Tracking social media metrics is essential to ensuring your brand’s online success. With so much time and money invested in platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, measuring the right data points ensures that your efforts yield meaningful results.
Whether you’re growing a following, driving engagement, or boosting sales, knowing what to track separates effective campaigns from wasted resources.
In our infographic, we’re giving you a quick-and-easy cheat sheet to all the main social media metrics, splitting them into two groups: Essential and Vanity.
Read more information about each metric below, and then at the very bottom of the article, grab the free infographic to save for later!
Why Tracking Metrics is Important
Measuring the right social media metrics ensures your campaigns are impactful and aligned with business objectives. Without tracking metrics like engagement rate or ROAS, you’ll risk wasting resources on ineffective strategies.
Measuring social media metrics allows brands to identify trends, optimise content, and maximise return on investment.
On top of that, tracking metrics helps brands adapt. For example, if engagement rates are low, marketers can tweak their content to better align with audience preferences. Social media moves fast, so this ability to read the data and pivot your strategy accordingly is essential.
The Social Media Metrics You NEED to Track
Now that we know why tracking social media metrics is so important, it’s time to look at which ones are essential. As we said right at the start of this guide, we’ve split the metrics into Essential and Vanity to help you determine the level of importance of each.
Read through the full list of social media metrics below!
Bonus: Check out the essential metrics for Pinterest here.
Essential Social Media Metrics
These social media metrics go beyond surface-level insights, providing a clear picture of how your content performs and how it contributes to business goals.
- Engagement Rate: This combines likes, comments, shares, and saves to show how your audience interacts with your content. Strong engagement rates (above 2% on average) indicate that your content resonates with your followers.
- Impressions: High impressions reflect how often your content is displayed, but it may not translate into meaningful engagement.
- Reach: Reach shows how many unique viewers saw your content. It’s useful for measuring awareness, but less important if users don’t engage further.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): A high CTR shows your content is driving users to click links, whether to your website or product pages. This metric is particularly valuable for ads and campaigns designed to generate web traffic.
- Conversion Rate: This metric directly ties your social activity to business goals, such as purchases or sign-ups. Conversion tracking is critical for proving ROI.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): For paid campaigns, ROAS measures how much revenue you generate for every pound spent. This metric determines the financial success of ad campaigns, with benchmarks varying by industry.
Vanity Social Media Metrics
Vanity metrics may look impressive but don’t always contribute directly to your goals.
- Likes: While likes are a good starting point for engagement, they don’t show whether users are clicking or purchasing.
- Followers: Monitoring the increase or decrease in followers helps you assess whether your strategies are attracting your target audience. Organic growth is especially valuable as it reflects genuine interest. However, it’s one of the least valuable metrics for overall campaign success, which makes it a vanity metric.
Conclusion
Focusing on the right social media metrics helps brands make smarter decisions, optimise campaigns, and achieve measurable results.
By prioritising essential metrics over vanity ones, you can ensure your efforts directly impact your goals. Stay consistent, adapt based on performance, and let your metrics guide your success.
The Social Media Metrics That Matter Infographic
Download the full infographic below! Be sure to keep this handy when it comes to measuring your success on social media!
This infographic was created using Facebook demographic statistics from DataReportal and Statista.
