A Guide to Tracking Social Media Campaign Success

Tracking social media is key to measuring campaign success, but in order to measure your campaigns effectively, you’ll need to determine what your goals are.

Whether you’re aiming to grow brand awareness, drive traffic, or increase sales, identifying the right metrics is key to understanding performance and improving future efforts.

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Why tracking social media campaign performance is important

Tracking social media is crucial for understanding what drives real results. It moves your strategy beyond vanity metrics like likes and shares, helping you focus on meaningful data such as engagement, reach, conversions, and ROI. By monitoring these metrics, you gain insights into what content resonates with your audience, which platforms perform best, and where your marketing spend is most effective.

Without tracking, it’s easy to waste time and budget on efforts that don’t move the needle. But with it, you can optimise campaigns in real time, test new ideas with confidence, and clearly measure success.

Set clear objectives and goals for your social media campaign

Before analysing performance, make sure you’ve set clear, defined goals. Use the SMART framework to guide your thinking:

• Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve (e.g. more Instagram followers)
• Measurable: Ensure you can track progress with data
• Attainable: Set realistic expectations based on past performance
• Relevant: Tie goals back to your wider marketing strategy
• Timely: Include a deadline or timeframe (e.g. 30 days)

With clear objectives, you can align the right metrics to determine campaign success.

How to track the success of a social media campaign

Once your campaign goals are in place, you can assess performance using relevant data. The metrics you track should directly align with the outcomes you’re targeting. such as engagement, traffic, conversions, or brand awareness.

1. Measure social media engagement

If your campaign was designed to boost interaction, then it’s a good idea to focus on your engagement rate. The calculation differs depending on whether the campaign was organic or paid:

• Organic campaign:
  (Total interactions ÷ Total followers) × 100
• Paid campaign:
  (Total interactions ÷ Total views/impressions) × 100

Social interactions include:

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Saves
• Reactions

You can further break engagement down by:

• Platform: to see where your audience is most responsive
• Content piece: to identify which posts resonated most

Use these insights to help identify which channels performed best and what type of content resonates most with your audience.

According to Adobe, anything between 1% – 6% can be considered a ‘good’ engagement rate (depending on the platform).

2. Track website traffic generated via social media

When the goal is to drive traffic to your website, tools like Google Analytics or built-in social insights are essential.

You’ll want to look at metrics such as the number of clicks generated, the click-through rate (CTR), and the bounce rate. If your bounce rate has noticeably increased during the campaign period, it may be a red flag, suggesting that your social content didn’t align with your landing page or that you’re targeting the wrong audience.

To maximise impact, consider running a retargeting campaign alongside your main push. This strategy keeps your brand top-of-mind and gives you another opportunity to engage users who visited but didn’t convert.

3. Track campaign performance with UTM parameters

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are simple URL tags that help you attribute traffic correctly in your analytics platform. By tagging your social media links with campaign-specific identifiers, you can pinpoint exactly where your website traffic is coming from, including the platform, campaign name, and even the specific content piece that drove the click.

Using UTM links gives you greater clarity on which elements of your campaign are performing best and allows for more accurate reporting and optimisation in future campaigns.

4. Track follower growth across social media

If building your audience is a key objective, tracking follower growth rate is essential. To calculate it, take the number of followers gained during the campaign, divide that by your starting follower count, and multiply by 100. For example, if you started with 2,000 followers and gained 200, your growth rate would be 10%.

Comparing your follower growth during the campaign to a similar time-period before the campaign gives you a meaningful benchmark and helps demonstrate whether your strategy had a tangible impact on audience growth.

5. Assess brand awareness generated by social media channels

For campaigns focused on visibility and reach, track metrics such as:

• Reach: Total unique users who saw your content
• Impressions: The total amount of times your content was shown
• Views: How many times your content was seen

An increase in these numbers from your pre-campaign baseline suggests greater brand exposure. These are particularly useful for top-of-funnel or brand-building efforts.

6. Measure leads and conversions

All marketing campaigns should have conversion and lead tracking implemented, as this enables you to see how many sales or business prospects your campaign is generating.  You can set up conversion tracking on your website, but you’ll need to utilise tracking tools such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager or a CRM platform such as HubSpot.

Here are some actions a user can take that could be considered as conversions:

• Bookings
• Enquiries
• Direct messages/emails
• Phone calls
• Sales
• Registrations
• Subscriptions
• Downloads
• Donations
• Installs

You can only measure leads and conversions if you have conversion tracking set up. If you’re interested in learning more about successfully tracking your social advertising campaigns then contact us to find out how we can help.

7. Calculate ROI (Return on Investment)

Understanding ROI helps you determine if your campaign was worth the money and resources you put into it. The formula is simple:

ROI = ((Revenue from campaign – Cost of campaign) ÷ Cost of campaign) × 100%

For example, if your campaign generated £2,000 in revenue and cost £500 to run, your ROI would be 300%. This is particularly important when justifying future marketing spend or refining budget allocation across channels.

8. Consider tracking soft metrics on social media

Not all successes are numerical. Soft metrics (such as user sentiment, direct feedback in comments or messages, brand mentions, and influencer engagement) can offer valuable insights into how your brand is being perceived.
These types of indicators can be especially useful for brand-building campaigns or when trying to measure emotional connection and trust.

Social media campaign tracking checklist

To stay on track, use this quick reference guide before, during, and after your campaign:

• Set SMART objectives with clear outcomes
• Choose KPIs based on campaign goals
• Use UTM-tagged links for accurate tracking
• Monitor key metrics: engagement, reach, clicks, conversions
• Set up proper conversion tracking in advance
• Review qualitative feedback and sentiment
• Calculate ROI where possible

Looking for some help with your paid social media campaigns? Contact us today to see how we can help you achieve your marketing goals.

Meet the Author

Leah Davies

Leah is a marketing manager with over 10 years of experience in advertising and marketing. She holds a Diploma in Digital Marketing and a specialist certification in Social Media, both awarded by the DMI. Leah helps businesses build stronger connections with their audiences through smart and effective digital strategies.

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