Jason Modemann, CEO of Mawave, explains what performance means in social media marketing, which data tells you whether your ads are working, and how automation can help you spend your marketing budget more effectively.
Social media has long since become much more than just a way to stay in touch across time and space: the digital infrastructure and the rapid growth of these networks let companies push product information and brand messaging to potential buyers around the world with just a few clicks. According to a series of studies, 1.3 million new users joined social networks every single day in 2020 alone — and the trend is rising.
To target your audience effectively in this rapidly growing pool of potential buyers, though, you need more than strong content. Modern social media performance marketing combines classic online marketing with deep data analysis on social platforms — because only when you know which ads drive the most purchases can you scale your social media strategy sustainably.
For this article, we sat down with Jason Modemann. As CEO of Mawave, one of the leading social media agencies in the German-speaking market, he advises companies on everything around professional social media performance marketing.
He explains what performance means in social media marketing, which data tells you whether your ads on social networks are working — and how social media automation can help you spend your marketing budget more effectively.
Jason Modemann, CEO of Mawave.
Contents
Performance as a success factor: what do organic posts and paid ads deliver on social?
How tracking makes social media marketing performance visible
Users' new say: App Tracking Transparency
When is the right time to automate your social media advertising?
“Performance means — to put it simply — that the results of social media marketing are measurable and have a direct impact on things like shop revenue,” Jason Modemann explains. “A holistic social media marketing strategy usually has three components: organic content, paid ads, and influencers — and each of them needs to perform in its own way to deliver full impact.”
Organic posts and paid ads on social media.
Organic social media marketing covers all non-sponsored posts a company places on its own account, distributed to that account's followers via the platform's regular algorithm. The focus of this sub-strategy is visibility:
Through organic posts, businesses build their brand on social networks, generate likes, and win new followers — who can in turn become amplifiers for the brand message.
Paid social media marketing, on the other hand, covers every form of advertising offered as a paid service across the various social networks. Unlike organic content, ads can in principle be shown to every user of a platform. So while paid content does help increase a website's visibility — and that website doesn't necessarily have to be a social media account — the focus is on conversion rate.
“This second sub-strategy, paid social media marketing, is designed to move users from social networks to a company's website and then on to a purchase decision,” Modemann adds. “The higher the performance of each individual ad, the more a business can achieve. To scale a business sustainably, it's becoming more and more important to evaluate the performance of different content pieces — that's the only way you really find out how well your marketing strategies actually work.”
The central metric for measuring success in social media performance marketing is what's called attribution. It traces a conversion back to an ad you published. Attribution is essentially the number of users your social media marketing reaches — and not just so they notice your brand, but so they take exactly the action your content piece is aiming for.
Take an example: you run an ad on social media to promote a sale in your online shop. Every time a user lands on your site through that ad and completes a purchase, that's an attribution — a connection between your ad and the target action that you can trace through your social media campaign data.
“Since the gap between clicking an ad and actually buying in the shop can be several days of consideration, it's important to look at attributions within a defined time window,” Jason Modemann explains. “The art is setting this so-called attribution window so that it really delivers reliable data. Set the window too narrow and we miss all the late purchase decisions — but if it's too wide, it's hard to tell whether social media marketing was really the deciding factor.”
To run effective social media performance marketing, you need one thing above all: data on user click and purchase behavior. Tracking that data isn't always easy, though — since spring 2021, many devices that used to deliver data consistently now ship with much more transparent privacy settings.
The reason: a new feature in Apple's operating systems since iOS14. App Tracking Transparency lets users decide for themselves, for the first time, whether the apps installed on their devices are allowed to track their activities for advertising purposes.
“Every device has a unique advertising ID that lets apps see which websites we visit on this device and which other applications we use,” Jason Modemann explains. “Advertisers can then use this data to show ads inside an app that are precisely tailored to our interests. If an app sees, for instance, that I've recently visited a lot of websites about E-Commerce logistics, it'll serve matching ads — for custom-designed packaging, for example, or professional returns management.”
App Tracking Transparency brings an important change here: now apps have to ask users on Apple iOS devices for permission if they want to track their activity in other applications.
“As performance marketing experts, we're obviously fans of data: the more we know, the more precisely we can match ads to audiences,” Modemann says. “The new App Tracking Transparency has noticeably changed the data baseline for many projects. But it's not a problem for effective performance marketing: there's less data available for performance analysis, sure — but an experienced agency can compensate by handling attribution windows skillfully.”
Finding the right moment for social media advertising.
Constant data analysis opens up new ways for companies to work on the performance of their ads in social media: data-driven performance marketing lets you show the right product to the right audience at the right moment — when their tracking data shows they're interested in similar products. At the same time, smart use of the data foundation gives businesses the chance to automate the advertising side of their social media activities.
“Specialized social media management tools can not only publish new content on schedule, they can also steer marketing campaigns. A similar development is happening in recruiting, where AI-supported recruiting strategies built on platforms like Recruit CRM help teams automate workflows and improve decision-making with data,” Jason Modemann says. “If an ad's interaction rate falls below a certain threshold — meaning too few users are clicking it — the tool automatically takes the campaign offline, for example. That's why I always advise companies to think about automation as early as possible.”
This particular form of automation in everyday work has a big advantage: advertisers only pay for social media marketing with demonstrably high performance. On top of that, automation unlocks enormous potential for creativity and growth — every minute you save on day-to-day work can be reinvested in developing your business.
“Long-term, I recommend approaching social media marketing the same way as order fulfillment: automation can do a lot, but at the same time tasks need to be strategically outsourced,” Modemann adds. “The machine still can't do everything — and when the number of work steps grows but a chunk of them still has to be handled by your employees, automation doesn't deliver real relief: we just scale the problem.”
To shift the growth ceiling not just short-term, it pays to think early about a two-part optimization strategy in social media marketing too — one that combines automation with the know-how and well-tuned workflows of a strong partner.
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