DISQO releases industry-first full-funnel normative benchmarks for social media campaign effectiveness

Single-source CX platform provides new effectiveness insights across siloed social media channels

December 12, 2022, Los Angeles, CA — Customer experience (CX) platform DISQO™ today released its first “Assessing Ad Impact in Social Media” report with unprecedented normative benchmarks for social media campaign effectiveness. The report compares the brand and outcomes lift performance of social media to that of other digital channels in hundreds of ad campaigns DISQO measured over the last 18 months. Benchmarks include:  

• Eight brand lift metrics: unaided awareness, aided awareness, familiarity, ad awareness, tagline association, favorability, consideration, and purchase intent;
• Six outcomes lift metrics: category search, category site visitation, category e-commerce, branded search, branded site visitation, and branded e-commerce; and 
• Category benchmarks: for consumables, goods, and services, as well as overall benchmarks for brand and outcomes lift regardless of category.

DISQO’s analysis found that social media often outperforms other digital channels across a wide array of attitudinal and behavioral metrics. This is true across diverse industry categories where social media shows nuanced advantages for certain KPIs. However, DISQO also found that social media’s strengths are more notable further down the purchase funnel where measurement is more challenging. Additionally, social media’s impacts are often more varied—with high peaks of performance and low valleys of waste—making fast, reliable measurement critical to campaign optimization.

“Marketers have struggled with inconsistent and siloed methodologies for measuring social media campaign effectiveness,” said Yannis Pavlidis, VP, Data Science and Analytics, DISQO. “By collecting social media exposure and subsequent online activities directly from consenting consumers, without relying on tags, mobile IDs, or cookie pixels, marketers can now compare the true impact of their social campaigns with normative benchmarks.”   

Traditional industry normative data sets only benchmark top-of-funnel brand metrics. DISQO’s fully-consented ad measurement lets marketers understand the full customer experience with top-of-funnel brand metrics and bottom-of-funnel conversion outcomes. DISQO captures lift across mobile, retail, and social platforms with a single-source methodology that allows advertisers to navigate measurement challenges such as:

• Multiple vendors and platforms = inconsistent methodologies: Marketers must often rely on individual social media platforms’ proprietary metrics to triangulate understanding of campaign effectiveness, leading to methodological complexity and inconsistent conclusions.
• Limited metrics = significant blind spots: Looking at social media performance using platform-provided metrics leaves massive outcomes insights unknown further down the buying cycle, such as social media’s ability to drive search and sales at large e-commerce platforms.
• Siloed channels = unreliable comparisons: If marketers are unable to compare ad performance between social media and other channels like CTV and display with the same methodology, they cannot determine if their marketing mix is optimally allocated.

“Assessing Ad Impact in Social Media,” is available here. Quarterly updates will be available on DISQO.com and accessible with DISQO’s Brand and Outcomes Lift products. Last month, DISQO also published Brand and Outcomes Lift Industry Benchmarks, the industry’s first and only full-funnel normative benchmarks for holistic ad effectiveness.