Optimizing Cross-Media Measurement with Social Benchmarks

See across silos for more holistic ad effectiveness insights

Whether you're a brand, advertiser, or consumer, 2025 brought seismic shifts to social media. From a brief but disruptive TikTok ban to the rise of AI-generated content and virtual social commerce, evolving platform features and media habits continue to reshape how people engage with social.

Add to that, social media has officially overtaken TV as the leading driver of consumer purchases as reported in DISQO’s 2025 Consumer Trends Report. This marks a major shift—not just in how people discover brands but in how social platforms influence lower-funnel actions like conversions and sales. As global social media ad spend is projected to reach $276.7 billion (nearly 40% of total digital ad spend), the opportunity at hand is massive.

To maximize impact, advertisers must meet consumers where they are and deliver relevant brand experiences. As the bar for data-driven decision-making continues to rise, marketers need to understand how each channel contributes to campaign performance—and how social media works in synergy with others to drive business outcomes. 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 2025 Social Media Ad Effectiveness Benchmarks help eliminate traditional silos with a single-source, objective methodology that provides a clear view of social media’s role in the media mix. As a pre-read, we explore here how brands can leverage our benchmarks to allocate resources in social and implement effective cross-channel measurement.

Current challenges in social media ad measurement

Traditional methods of measuring social campaign performance often fail to capture how social media works alone and alongside other channels to drive results, leaving advertisers with an incomplete picture of campaign effectiveness.  

The truth is that consumers don’t engage with media in isolation. Their journey to purchase is now more fragmented, shaped by touchpoints across multiple platforms. With that in mind, let’s first align on what traditionally impedes 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 surrounding 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 some 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. Understanding these industry nuances is essential to discovering which campaigns are more, less, or equally effective on social versus other channels.  

See how social media performs best for new, emerging, and established brands

Social media is a powerful tool, but its effectiveness depends on where a brand is in its growth journey. New brands often use it to establish visibility, build awareness, and engage early adopters. Emerging brands rely on it to strengthen brand identity, drive consideration, and convert interest into measurable actions. Established brands leverage it to maintain relevancy, deepen customer relationships, and reinforce their position in the market. The key to maximizing impact is knowing how social media contributes to business outcomes at each stage. Without clear benchmarks, brands risk misallocating resources or overestimating what social alone can achieve. 

DISQO’s social benchmarks eliminate the guesswork, showing how social media fuels success—whether through brand lift, engagement, or conversion-driven performance. With a single-source, objective measurement framework, brands can compare results across platforms and business maturity levels to ensure social media investments deliver real, measurable value.

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, marketers and advertisers can use DISQO Brand Lift and Outcomes Lift to measure social media campaigns objectively and holistically. Then, compare 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 measurements. Curious how to tap into the same results? Download the report and contact us at info@disqo.com for more information.

Optimize your social media investments by working with DISQO!