An essay on why engagement rates are a red herring and how you should actually track and measure the results of your social media marketing activities.

1. HOWTOMEASURE
SUCCESSINSOCIAL
WHY ENGAGEMENT RATES ARE A RED HERRING
AND HOW YOU SHOULD TRACK YOUR RESULTS

2. 1
HOWTOMEASURE
SUCCESSINSOCIAL
WHY ENGAGEMENT RATES ARE A
RED HERRING AND HOW YOU
SHOULD TRACK YOUR RESULTS
Let me start by saying sorry. From
us agencies to you brand marketers,
we’re sorry.
Social builds brands and creates sales. As a
marketer who believes in social, you can
often find yourself defending this fact. Or
maybe, just sometimes, when you’ve had a
bad day, maybe not quite believing it. We’re
sorry about that, it’s our fault.
When social was coming of age and into the
consciousness of people and brands (I’m
thinking, circa 2011) it was all very exciting.
As agencies and marketers we all inherently
knew (know!) that communicating and
building relationships with consumers
builds brands and ultimately leads to sales.
‘Social’ was where people communicated
with one another and built personal
relationships so it made pretty good sense.
Nowadays when you add the sheer scale of
social on top of this fact, it becomes a no
brainer.
But we made a mistake, and this is why I
want to apologise.
Hi, We are Impero, we bring brands fame
and glory. Here's why.
At their essence, brands are tools to help
people make decisions on what to buy.
Fame and glory makes those decisions
easier.
Famous brands sell more stuff because
famous brands are always top of mind.
Glorious brand experiences help sell
more stuff because rich and engaging
executions linger longer in consumers'
minds and create deep relationships and
brand passion.
If you want to bring your brand Fame
and Glory – hire us. We’re awesome.
www.weareimpero.com
IMPERO

3. 2
OUR MISTAKE – WE INVENTED THE
‘ENGAGEMENT RATE’
We didn’t work hard enough to create meas-
ures that told us anything interesting or
insightful about our successes or failures in
this space. Instead we rounded up any data
we could get (which was severely limited at
the time) and invented a measure. We took
all types of engagements and divided them
by reach (or worse, fan numbers). Yep, we
invented the ‘engagement rate’ and it was a
mistake. Here’s why.
And that was about it. We knew every other
brand was is in social and they must be onto
something. If we knew we were doing well
against our competitors, that was good news!
And we kept going - making more creative
that resulted in a better engagement rate, so
we kept winning.
But benchmarking yourself against your
competitors only tells you so much. In fact, it
doesn’t usually tell you anything of real
value when it comes to social. It doesn’t take
into account your goals, and the fact that
they are probably different from your
competitors. So why is it something that we
obsess over?
We invented a measure and made creative
to achieve success by this measure without
ever questioning what we should be meas-
uring in the first place. I refer to it as the
“social red herring”. It distracts us from using
relevant and important social measures.
Well, it’s time to grow up. It’s time to link
social back to business and brand goals.
Engagements
Reach
A good agency
sales pitch
=
We (agencies and brands – no, I don’t think
we should take all the blame for this) desper-
ately needed to prove that social made a
difference, but we weren’t sophisticated
enough to prove it outright. So we invented
the engagement rate’ because it told us how
well we were performing in social compared
to our competitors. The discussion went
something like this:
Benchmarking doesn’t usually tell
you anything of real value when it
comes to social.
“How are we doing in social?”
“Well, we have the
highest engagement
rate in our category”
“Great, keep going”

4. DEFINE WHAT TYPE
OF CAMPAIGN WE
SHOULD BE RUNNING
Nope, you won't hear many digital and social
agencies say this, but not all problems are
best solved online. So before we start, should
we even be in social?
Let’s assume the answer is yes, otherwise
this article won't reach it’s word count.
2
3
DEFINE THE
MEASURES THAT
WILL PROVE ITS
SUCCESS OR FAILURE.
AND CREATE YOUR
OWN SCORE CARD
This is the tricky part, but the most valuable
step in this process. It’s why I wrote this
article. It’s where social gets personal,
because your score card is all about you.
3
DEFINE THE STRATEGY
TO ACHIEVE THOSE
GOALS
Every good communications campaign starts
with a good strategy.
4
MAKE CREATIVE AND
RUN CAMPAIGN
A step not to be taken lightly of
course, but for the purposes of this article
let’s bundle this whole process into a single
step.
5
TRACK AGAINST
WHAT IS SET OUT IN
STEP 3
To gauge the success, start tracking results
against your score card immediately.
6
6 STEPS TO MEASURING
SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN SOCIAL
DEFINE THE PROBLEM
What problem are we trying to fix?
Or, what goal are we trying to
achieve? Do we have low awareness or
frequency? Do we have an image problem?
Do we need to increase likability (like with a
lowercase ‘l’ you’ll note). Do we have a new
product that we think our audience will
love? Or is it something else?
1
So let’s look at step 3 – and how it can
be applied to you and your brands...

5. 4
BRAND
SCORECARD
FOR EACH LIKE
We really want people to read our
message, and agree with it, we want
people to be positive about what we’ve
had to say. The human reaction to this
on Facebook is to click the little ‘Like’
button.
HOW TO DEVELOP A SCORECARD
Scorecards enable you to weigh the quantity
and quality of specific social actions to then
determine how successful a social
campaign is. It allows us to move away from
the ‘one size fits all’ measurement.
Right now, we need to talk in concrete terms
so let’s say your brand’s problem is relevance
within your target demographic.
We all know your brand, but it doesn’t get us
going, it doesn’t resonates with us.
We have nothing in common with it. It’s nice,
but dim.
In the days of old, we would have said “let’s
make some content and track our beloved
engagement rate”. We would have measured
all likes, comments, shares, re-blogs,
favorites, whatever, who cares, just track it.
All engagements were equal. We just want to
be better than the guy down the road (our
competitor).
Nowadays, we need to think hard about
what type of measure will track our success
or failure.
To keep this simple example,
even more simple, let’s keep this to
Facebook exclusively. Let’s say...
FOR EACH SHARE
Share’s are good – we want people to
agree and share our message for word
of mouth reasons, but they’re not our
primary concern, because we don’t
want to skew our creative into cheap
tricks to get shares.
REACH, 10K PEOPLE
We need to reach people, who doesn’t,
but it’s less about share numbers of
reach here, it’s more about them Likes –
so let’s attribute 10 points for every 10K
people reached.
VIEW RATE DROP OFF
If someone watches our film (if we create
them, and maybe we won't because they
score so low on our scorecard) longer
than 75% - we get another 10 points.
Films are great for landing messages, but
again, we’re less concerned with people
hearing our message, more concerned
with them agreeing with it.
COMMENTS (NON-NEGATIVE)
Comments are great, we love comments,
but stoking up lots of debate or feedback
won’t help us solve our current brand
issue. So we don’t want to skew our
creative towards comments (e.g. ‘tell us
what you think below’ or ‘choose A or B’
type creative).
50PTS
25PTS
10PTS
10PTS
5PTS

6. Your scorecard should be developed with
your agency.
You should probably work with a planner,
strategist or an analyst to do this. BUT NOT
THE CREATIVES. We find, for best results,
brief the creative team once they know what
they are trying to achieve.
WHAT’S A GOOD SCORE?
5
NOW BRIEF IT IN
Good question. But, sorry, we can’t answer
that for you. We don’t know your investment,
your market, or your consumer. But what we
can tell you is; if you follow the scorecard
method and you get the weighting right you
can compare return on social investment
between your brands and campaigns and
start to really understand which campaigns
are performing and which aren’t. And impor-
tantly, how those campaigns are solving
your brand goals.
If you stick with engagement rates, you run
the risk that your agency will chase a high
rate before chasing a solution to your brand
problems. And as a brand you’ll never be
able to tell if you’re winning or not.
In the simple example I have outlined above,
we want to show people our brand has more
in common with them than they think. We
want to show our target market we’re not
that different - in fact, we share the lot of the
same ideas. In our language, ‘we’re relevant’.
First and foremost, I hypothesize that we
need to make a lot of content that people can
align with, agree with and think positively
about. Content that people like (lower case l).
In this case, a good idea to track Likes (with
an uppercase L). If we can put content out
there that encourages a million unique Likes
for the campaign, it means we have a million
consumers who have seen our messaging
and outwardly told us they agree with it.
But the other measures still matter, we work
to a total scorecard sum of 100. By allocating
points for each measure out of 100, we can
accurately compare campaigns – even when
the objective or brand goal is different.
+44 207 998 7571
MICHAEL@WEAREIMPERO.COM
UNIT 306, METROPOLITAN WHARF
70 WAPPING WALL
LONDON, E1 W3SS
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