Measuring social performance: moving beyond ROAS and ad-centric logic
How do you measure the performance of social campaigns today? It is a real challenge: deploying performance measurement that moves beyond a purely ROAS or ad-centric logic. And this applies as much to Meta as to Google or the other platforms. Because each one first measures what makes it look good.
Our way of approaching the subject is simple: there is no single index, no direct measure of performance. There are bundles of clues. And to read them, you have to cross several viewpoints.
Three levels of reading complement each other:
The first is ad-centric: the measurement reported by the media platforms themselves, most often in last click. Useful for day-to-day management, but structurally skewed.
The second is site-centric: measurement through Google Analytics and the brand’s attribution tools. It widens the view beyond each platform’s walled garden.
The third is the back-end: the website and the actual revenue recorded. It is the business anchor, the only data that does not lie about the value actually created.
The job of an agency positioned on business acceleration is precisely to know how to aggregate these signals to produce a performance measurement that holds.
From short-term management to the global vision
Of course, short-term management remains necessary. Daily monitoring can be done with an ad-centric and site-centric view. But the challenge is to integrate the site-centric and the back-end into a global vision, to answer the right questions: how does my media mix contribute to the site’s overall performance, and how does it generate organic demand, direct demand and SEO demand?
This is where the real value is played out. A well-managed media mix does not just convert the immediate audience: it grows the brand and its territory, and makes it less dependent on media.
The tigrz approach and the Sherkan methodology
This is what we develop with the tigrz approach and the Sherkan methodology, which is our own. It provides a 360 view of performance and shows how paid media, and a fortiori paid social, are accelerators of the brand’s whole mix. The aim is not to measure an isolated channel, but to understand how each lever contributes to building a lasting posture and lasting demand for the brand.
Market tools: MMM and MTA
Tools today make it possible to go beyond the platforms’ reading alone: the rollout of marketing modelling models. They assess the performance of paid levers across a site’s overall performance, and several approaches coexist.
MTA (multi-touch attribution) follows a user’s conversion journey across touchpoints and distributes credit among them. Flexible and fast to deploy, it is valuable for day-to-day tactical optimisation, but it captures neither seasonality, nor external effects, nor real incrementality.
MMM (marketing mix modelling) is more sophisticated. It breaks sales down into base sales and channel effects, integrating seasonality, competitive activity and context variables. It thus measures base effects, the increment actually carried by media, and assigns each platform a role in the mix. This renewed interest is clear: according to eMarketer, 27.6% of US marketers consider MMM their most reliable measurement method, ahead of MTA (19.4%). Open-source solutions such as Robyn (Meta) or Meridian (Google, launched in 2024, with Bayesian modelling at geographic level) have accelerated its spread.
Within tigrz, we know how to deploy these models, in simple, ad hoc formats, sometimes co-funded, as well as in more robust formats. The aim is to assess overall performance over the short, medium and long term. The market best practice is, moreover, to combine the two: MTA for day-to-day tactical optimisation, MMM for strategic planning.
From measurement to Brand Elevation
Once these signals are aggregated, the decision becomes readable: positioning media where it creates accelerated value for the mix, but also creates overall value for the brand over the long term.
This is where we talk about Brand Elevation. Measuring well means helping the brand be less dependent on media in the short term, and rely on media to build lasting business increments. Measuring right is not an end in itself: it is the condition for making paid social a brand growth engine, and not a mere acquisition cost.
Going further. This topic continues with our approach to tracking, first-party data and AI and our media effectiveness measurement methods.
On the same topic: « Social commerce: why social is the business accelerator of your whole media mix » and « How to measure the business increment brought by your Facebook or Instagram campaigns? Our case with ba&sh. ».
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