Socialbakers unveils a ‘near real-time’ social ad benchmark

How do you know whether your social advertising is doing as well as it should?

Social media marketing platform Socialbakers is today providing one kind of yardstick. It’s a “near real-time” social ad performance benchmark, based on anonymized data from the company’s 2,000+ clients.

The Prague-based company describes this as near real-time, although it’s updated the previous day. But competing ad benchmarks, Chief Product Evangelist Moses Velasco told me, are usually more static and updated only annually or quarterly.

Without looking at benchmarks for how others in the industry are performing, he said, an advertiser is dependent on its own campaign history.

For instance, he said, an advertiser might find good performance for its boosted posts, but the total ad spend may be low compared to the industry. This means that the good performance could be better if the spending was matched.

A Socialbakers client can connect any Facebook ad account to the platform. The benchmark shows ad spend performance by industry, country or region, and Velasco said his company expects to add Instagram.

The data represents $3 billion in ad spend and currently covers 10 industries, 14 countries and 11 regions. Socialbakers requires that benchmark categories have at least 200 client ad accounts in order to obtain enough data.

Of course, Socialbakers’ clients don’t necessarily distribute across industries in a way that ensures a representative sample of data. The automotive category, for instance, might have only two car makers, with the rest being makers of aftermarket products, engine parts or car-related services.

Velasco responded that this benchmark provides some insight into how a given industry is doing for its targeted Facebook ads. This might be useful for a brand that wants to explore a new market, or that wants a view on how others in the same product category are doing.