Mapping out your KPIs and why it’s important
If you’re working with a beauty performance marketing agency, or even if you’re handling your beauty digital marketing in-house, mapping out what paid media KPIs you should be tracking is really important. Whether your goal is to build brand awareness or to drive bottom funnel conversions with purchased focus ads, knowing what KPI’s are associated to each phase of the funnel is critical. This ensures you can accurately measure success, optimise budget allocation, and set meaningful targets for every campaign.
Awareness/ top-of-funnel KPIs you should be tracking
What is the awareness marketing phase?
Whether you’re a big well known beauty brand, or a small beauty start-up brand, people may not be aware of your brand yet, or of a specific product, bundle or skincare need that you address. To help get your brand and products widely recognised, you need to invest in awareness ads and the ultimate goal for awareness is reach. This can be easily confused with traffic and action-driving, but the ultimate goal of awareness ads are to ensure top-of-mindness for a user’s next skincare purchase.
It’s important to note that awareness ads can be confused with mass marketing or a wide reach, but it’s important in any awareness campaign to show the right ads to the right people.
To create awareness ads effectively, brands should showcase their brand without hard selling or pushing urgency in the call to action, think soft CTA’s like “Learn more” or “See why everyone loves this cleanser”. Adding social proof to the ad adds credibility and gives trust signals in a very natural manner. It works well to highlight a hero ingredient or benefit which helps with brand recognition, alongside making visually appealing lifestyle content, which encourages users to save or share the ad.
Rare Beauty consistently succeeds in their top of funnel, awareness marketing, for a number of reasons. They lead with their brand values and mission, not just their product range, this helps to deepen the emotional connection. Their ads feel the most authentic because they utilise their community and use lots of UGC, refraining from overly polished ad formats. They also powerfully link products to emotions which strengthens recall, like their ‘feel seen’ collection. And last but not least, Selena’s face of the brand and how she appears in the ads, this adds instant credibility without overshadowing the brands authenticity.
Core awareness KPIs across social should be:
- Reach
- Impressions
- CPM
- Frequency
How many relevant people (within your core demographic) have seen the ads? How much is 1,000 views costing you to generate Frequency is important as if the same people are seeing an ad 20 times over the course of a few days, they’ll quickly get bored and even sometimes frustrated with the brand. So ideally, keep frequency to a handful of times a week.
Middle-of-funnel phase, what is it and how can we measure it?
The consideration phase: At this point, you want to start to consider driving action and intent: Maybe a page follow, a competition entry, post engagement or even traffic to your website or a retailer stockist. The goal here is to take the user from passively being aware of your brand and its products, to actively engaging with your brand before considering a purchase.
Core KPIs across social should be:
- Engagement (with a post, when ‘boosted’ by paid efforts)
- Page follows (which can be encouraged by using paid follower campaigns)
- Profile views (which can also be encouraged by campaigns)
- Email sign-ups
- Traffic
You will also want to make sure you’re tracking and measuring the cost of these things too: cost per follow, cost per email subscription, and cost per click.
It’s important to remember that all of these things can also inadvertently support in-store purchases by building relationships between a consumer and a brand.
Bottom funnel phase- the converting phase
At this stage, the goal is all about conversion: turning the awareness and consideration into an actual sale, whether that’s online or in-store.
The user already knows who you are and has engaged with your brand (likely a few times), so the focus here is to make a purchase seamless. This is where product-specific ads, promotional offers, bundles, and retargeting campaigns (based on email subscribers, web visitors who didn’t convert, people who clicked retailer ads or engaged with your posts) are most effective, as they reach people who are ready to purchase. You’ll want to target super-warm audiences at this phase, these are your product page viewers and people who added-to-cart but didn’t checkout.
Bottom of funnel ad formats
The best BOF ads use social proof to eliminate doubt, demonstrate clear benefits and real results to help consumers justify the purchase (quickly), and use punchy, direct CTA’s like “shop now”, and “last chance” or “20% off today” incentives, to push the shopper straight to the checkout.
Bottom-of-funnel KPIs you should track:
- Conversions (completed checkouts)
- Cost per acquisition (CPA). So not only the volume of conversions generated, but how efficient and profitable they are for your business.
Foundation are a specialist paid media beauty marketing agency. We have years of experience helping beauty brands, big and small, reach impressive ROI stats through effective paid media campaigns. We’ve helped both Tropic skincare and Benefit cosmetics achieve a 5:1 ROAS, through restructuring campaigns and reducing reliance of branded-keyword campaigns. If you’d like to see how we can help scale up your paid media activity, get in touch with us today. As a thank you for getting to the end of this blog (!), we’d love to offer you a free Meta or Google account audit and run some paid media projections for you. Just quote “paid media KPIs” when you speak to a member of the team.
