First we discuss and list out the goal of Instagram ads (Customer Goals, Business Goals)
Customer Goals: There are two types of customers (Ad creator, Ad viewer)
1. Ad creator:
a. The ad should lead to a certain business goal (Increase visit to website, Awareness building, Lead generation etc)
b. Easy to create an ad, publish an ad (Creating the ad, Selecting Media, writing text for the ad)
c. Targeting the right customer
d. Posting the ad for the defined metrics (Demography, where will it be shown, how long wil it shown for)
e. Getting reactions (Hearts, comments)
f. Getting direct messages from leads
2. Ad Viewer
a. Relevant ads
b. Frequency of ads (there should not be so many ads, that the customers gets annoyed)
c. Ease of finding the Action buttons
d. Ease of reacting
e. Ease of setting preferences for the ad
Business Goals:
3. Engagement: We want users to find relevant products/ services through ads
4. Helping the community: Ads should help individuals or business create awareness about their services/ products.
5. Revenue: Instagram ads should be helping generate revenue
6. Retention: Decrease the churn or not effect retention at all, increase the retention
Based on the above discussed goals, we will figure out the metrics that measure these goals.
Metrics:
Customer Goals:
1. Ad creator
a. % of times the ad reached its defined/ promised goal (if instagram said, that it can reach 100k people, it would lead to 50 clicks)
b. Average time taken to create an ad
c. No of times ad creator was satisfied with the promotion
d. As Facebook’s goal is to create communities and help them, Instagram would want to make sure that the cost per ad is as optimal as possible. So we can have a metric to internally measure (given a set of conditions), how well the ad did in terms of (cost per ad, cost per impression). This is a metric to see how well our ad placement is doing.
i. Cost per ad objective
ii. A/B test – we will take a control group of ads and a test group of ads. (Both the ads will have the same settings (target audience, budget, goal, ad type, images etc). But we will test our algorithm as to how well we can place the ads to make sure that the cost per goal goes down.
e. Average no of reactions an ad gets compared to an organic post
i. Here also we can have an A/B test where we have an organic post as the control and the ad which is exactly similar as the organic post and see which one is getting more reactions.
f. No of direct messages to a business page 7 days post ad delivery.
i. If the direct message landed via clicking through an ad and then landing on the business page on instagram
2. Ad Viewer
a. No of times a user hides an ad
b. No of ads per organic posts
i. A/B testing to see how many number of ads per organic post is optimal in a feed.
Business Goals:
3. Engagement
a. Time spent scrolling through an ad – No of impressions
b. No of times an ad was turned off
c. No of times the app was closed while going through an ad
d. No of click through rates
4. Revenue
a. No of ads being created per day
b. % of budget utilized per ad
5. Retention:
a. Indirect measure: Can do an A/B test to figure out if ads lead to churn.
Metric Prioritization:
Whether a metric is important or not, depends on how strongly it reflects the goal, how direct and easy to the metric is. So lets classify the metrics
1a. Direct measure of success for ad creator as well as revenue metric for Instagram business goal
1b. Probably an indirect measure
1c. Direct and strong measure of ad success for the ad creator, and thus will ultimately lead to more ads being created and thus measure the business success
1d. Cost per ad objective – If we can optimize this, more ads will be created. This is very important.
1e. Direct measure if the ad objective is to get more likes, indirect measure otherwise.
1f: Indirect measure, the message could be related to the ad or maybe not.
2a. Very important to understand the relevancy of the ads
2b. Very important to understand how many ads need to be posted
3a,b : Covered previously
3c: Key measure, to see if people are getting anonoyed by the ads.
4a. Very important metric to track revenue ultimatelu
4b. Metric will show the success of the ad placement and the revenue as well.
5a. Indirect measure
Conclusion: Metrics to track (1a, 1c, 1d, 1e, 2a, 2b, 3c, 4a, 4b)