Social Media Performance Overview: Metrics That Actually Matter

Social media platforms are designed to show you metrics that make you feel good about your content — likes, follower counts, impressions. These are called vanity metrics because they feel important but rarely correlate with business outcomes.

Business metrics for social media are different:

• Traffic from social — how many sessions on your website came from social channels?
• Conversion rate from social traffic — of those sessions, how many converted to purchase?
• Revenue attributed to social — total sales where social was a touchpoint in the attribution path
• CAC from social — cost per new customer acquired via social (paid and organic combined)
• Follower-to-buyer conversion rate — what % of your social followers have ever purchased?

Different platforms have different meaningful metrics:

TikTok: video completion rate (target: > 40%), profile visit rate from video (measures curiosity generated), add-to-cart from TikTok Shop link, comment sentiment.

Instagram: story reply rate (measures genuine engagement), link click rate from stories and bio link, Reel save rate (saves indicate content that viewers want to reference again — a strong intent signal), DM volume after content posts.

Pinterest: outbound click rate (Pinterest is a high-intent discovery platform — clicks to your site are valuable), monthly impressions growth (slower, longer-tail channel).

LinkedIn (for B2B): connection growth rate, post impressions among target job titles, inbound enquiries from content.

With your eCommerce platform and social channels connected, ask AskBiz:

• *'How much revenue was attributed to social channels last month?'*
• *'What percentage of my website traffic comes from TikTok vs Instagram?'*
• *'Compare the conversion rate of traffic from TikTok to traffic from Instagram over the last 90 days'*
• *'Which social post drove the highest traffic to my website this quarter?'*

For direct social commerce (TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping), AskBiz shows sales by platform and by product directly in your Channels dashboard.

Effective social media targets connect to business goals:

❌ 'Grow Instagram followers by 10,000' — vanity target

✅ 'Generate £5,000/month in revenue attributed to Instagram' — business target

❌ 'Post 5 times per week' — activity target

✅ 'Maintain a 3% monthly growth in website traffic from social' — outcome target

Set 1–2 business-outcome targets per platform. Review monthly in AskBiz. Only increase posting frequency if it demonstrably improves the business outcome target — more content for its own sake is not the goal.