Depending on the size and scope of your company, this article may or may not directly answer how you measure your Facebook success. However, even if you’re a relative start-up with only a few employees, or even if you’re flying solo, you can still use the information in this article to help you get a solid idea about how well you’re doing on Facebook – just in case the dollar figures aren’t explanatory enough.
The problem a lot of advertisers have is that they’re spread out over such an expanse of business real estate—multiple websites, multiple ad campaigns, on-location offices, employees, outsourcing, etc.—that they cannot accurately gauge just how well their social media campaign is doing versus the other marketing they’re doing. Thus they need a better way to look at Facebook-specific numbers.
How to Gauge Social Media ROI
The first step here is to actually break your business down and to judge Facebook and the campaign you’re running on its own. You want to judge it independent of all other aspects of your business; in fact, you always want to judge these aspects separately. You could be profiting overall but still losing money on Facebook, or you could be doing incredibly well on Facebook but still losing money in other areas.
After you break your business down and begin to look at only Facebook, you want to focus entirely on your ROI – first making sure to realize what you’re investing and where you’re investing it.
Although your social media marketing should in no way stand alone as a campaign, it needs to be measured that way in order to ensure you’re actually receiving a return on your investment. A lot of companies invest a lot of money, so judging how well it’s paying off is incredibly important.
Direct Leads vs. Brand Awareness
There are different reasons why you want your business to be active on Facebook. Common reasons are: Overall increased sales directly attributable to Facebook, new business leads stemming from your campaign, an overall increase in business efficiency, an improvement in customer feedback and customer engagement, and increased brand recognition.
You could say that there are two types of Facebook strategies: one where your goal is to attract more leads and direct sales – probably through advertising – and one where you want to make your brand more visible, communicate with customers and get an active community around your product or service.
In the first category, ROI is pretty straightforward to measure. Compare how much you’ve spent on ads to the sales they generated. If you end up with red numbers you might need to work on your ad copy and images and/or your targeting. But even if you make money, you might still be able to improve the ads to make more.
The ROI of the second category has to be measured over a longer period of time. But with a successful Facebook presence – where you communicate with customers, present new deals and put your brand in a fun environment – you’re able to increase the customer lifetime, have existing customers referring new ones and increase the overall value per fan.
In other words, for some campaigns you’re not looking to target a dollar amount right away. While an advertising campaign will most certainly give you a return on your investment, social campaigns are going to be about more than an immediate return. You’re looking for an increase in your brand and an increase in the size and scope of your business.

A successful Facebook campaign will allow your business to grow. This growth is obviously measured by more than what your initial return is.