Optimizing Cross-Media Measurement with Social Benchmarks

See across silos for more holistic ad effectiveness insights

Social media is expected to account for one-fifth of global ad spend in 2024, rivaling TV and other digital investments in a brand’s media mix. However, the siloed social landscape makes it difficult to draw conclusions about campaign effectiveness for media spend optimization. 

Today’s consumers don’t engage with media or make purchase decisions based on commercial messages in just one channel. To ensure a message is received, advertisers must meet their customers where they are and deliver relevant experiences across multiple channels. That’s why cross-media measurement has become central to campaign success.

As the bar for data-driven C-Suite conversations gets increasingly higher, marketers need to understand each channel’s unique contributions to campaign performance, including how it fuels business outcomes in synergy with other channels. For CMOs and their teams, effectively communicating what’s next in an advertising strategy, and more importantly… proving why it will work is paramount.

DISQO’s 2024 Social Media Ad Effectiveness Benchmarks leverage a single-source, objective methodology to see across silos. Download the report for the ultimate guide to benchmarking social media campaign performance. As a pre-read, we explore here how brands can leverage our benchmarks to allocate resources in social and implement effective cross-media measurement.

Current challenges in social media ad measurement

Social media advertising has never been more important, yet still challenging. Let’s first align on what has traditionally impeded good social media measurement:

• Inconsistent methodologies across vendors: marketers typically only receive proprietary metrics for each individual social platform in their mix. Different methodologies and results can lead to erroneous conclusions. It’s tantamount to adding apples to oranges, and naturally… brands and their agencies would prefer an objective approach to measurement that is cross-media. This is the only way they can intelligently optimize their media mix.
• Limited metrics: Most social media platforms highlight engagement (e.g., likes/shares) and direct purchase conversion estimates, but this results in significant blindspots around brand impacts and crucial performance outcomes like  search, site visits, and e-commerce activity that are stimulated by ad exposure.  

Understanding social media’s value to enhance cross-media measurement

Marketers are investing copious amounts of money, time, research, and other resources toward social media. But, these investments are only as good as the measurement frameworks that surround them. If they can’t measure social platforms objectively and fully, and if you don’t have normative benchmarks for comparisons within your category and beyond… you’re in the dark about how well you’re doing.  Here’s how DISQO’s ad measurement and social benchmarks solve for this.

Unpack each social media platform’s unique strengths

Every media channel has its strengths and weaknesses. Understanding these nuances will ensure that you are making the right investments for your business objectives. This requires taking a look at social media advertising effectiveness across the entire funnel, from unaided awareness down to site visits and e-commerce activity. Identifying the metrics that matter for your campaign goals and aligning them with each channel's strengths drives powerful results.

Our benchmarks reveal that social is a trusted medium for building an engaged community of brand followers, but they also highlight its potential to move down-funnel behaviors, like category search, site visits, and e-commerce. However, it’s worth noting that there are many cases in which social media ads can fall short compared to other channels. So, brands need to balance social media’s advantages with other channels’ strengths to capitalize on cross-channel synergies.

See how social media performs across business categories

It will come as no surprise that social media ad performance varies across business categories. Making a low-stakes purchase, like new shampoo, is a lot easier to approach on social media than buying a new car, for example. It’s important to consider social media ad performance in the context of your industry. 

DISQO’s benchmarks showcase social performance across several key industry categories: consumables, goods, services, and vehicles. Our growing database also allows us to go deeper on particular industries like food & beverage, health & beauty, apparel & accessories, and retail. Understanding these industry nuances is essential to discovering which campaigns are more, less, or equally effective on social versus other channels.

Champion your campaign effectiveness with data-driven insights

DISQO’s unique social media benchmarks are essential to communicating campaign effectiveness to your stakeholders. Consistency of source and methodology ensures that our normative benchmarks are based on a similar audience, eliminating the risk of comparing apples to oranges. Explaining the nuances of multiple vendor datasets to your stakeholders is an unenviable task. Instead, use DISQO Brand Lift and Outcomes Lift to measure your social media campaigns objectively and holistically. Then, compare your results to our benchmarks. Your campaign results presentation will become a compelling narrative that supports future investment. 

Because DISQO audience members opt into having their digital behaviors metered across channels — including within social media — DISQO can see ad exposure without relying on tags or data from the platform itself. We can also see what the consumer does next, outside of the social platform where they were exposed to the commercial message. 

With our consistent experimental design methodology (exposed and control) across all media channels, we’ve helped hundreds of brands and agencies to perform objective cross-media and full-funnel campaign measurement.

Optimize your social media investments by working with DISQO!