The short answer it depends.
The long answer:
To delve into this, we need to identify the two types of likes first. Page Likes or Post likes. Page Likes can be bought from anywhere and users can like your page without visiting it to see or engage with any of your content. Post likes are the likes that individual posts receive based on how interesting or engaging people find them.
Now to answer the question. Are Likes beneficial as a KPI? Well, it really depends on the objective of your campaign. If you are starting out with a fresh page and have no audience and your activity is to grow your fan base then a way to measure that is with Page Likes, so in that way, the number of Page Likes you are getting based on your activity is beneficial. After all, you need people to see the amazing marketing content you are producing for them.
If however, you are tracking post Likes (not PAGE LIKES) then tracking Likes in this sense helps you determine how engaging or interesting your content is. No one will share or like a post that isn’t relevant to them or their network. Again in this sense, it is beneficial.
The rule of thumb is to identify what your real end goal or business objective is – ie. what you want people to do after they like your page – because that is what would be beneficial to you or your brand. Do you want them to sign up for a form, or to leave a review, or to call a certain number? Tracking the number of conversions then would give you a better view of the effectiveness of your marketing. Likes would be a great side benefit of this activity, but at the end of the day, they should never be the main goal of a campaign. $150 can get you 1250 likes give or take.
Using Contextual search keywords to determine where people are in the marketing funnel.
This is based on the idea of intent. We can tell where people are in the marketing funnel based on the type of words they type or the searches they make.
A user can go from Pre Awareness to Awareness to Consideration to Preference to Action to Loyalty.
- Users in pre-awareness are curious. They are looking for information and may or may not be vaguely aware that a product exists that could answer their problems. Someone in this phase would use non-industrial related terms. An example is instead of searching for “Search Engine Optimization Tips” they would search for “Get Higher in Google”. Keyword phrases in this phase usually include What is, How to, difference between, best way to… etc
- Awareness in this phase users have just started to understand their problem and now describe it using industry-related terms and or product attributes. They are now looking for ways to solve it. Now their searches will include industry-relevant jargon but have goal-oriented phrases; improve, upgrade, prevent, optimism, noise reducing, 500GB hard drive. In this phase, they are looking for information
- Consideration. in this phase, there is less talk about the issue and more about the solution. The user here now has a preferred solution in mind and is just looking for where to source it. They tend to have a specific product in mind but are not sure about the brand or model. Keywords here are oriented towards finding a specific type of service provider or product that meets their newly realized requirements. example Agencies, consultants, in-house service providers, software engineers, Nike Air review.
Awareness of issue: hunger
Preferred solution: order Pizza
Consideration: Pizza Delivery Kennedy Town
Awareness of issue: need to be higher in Google
Preferred Solution: Hire an SEO consultant
Consideration: SEO Consultant in Kennedy Town
Preference, the search keywords start to include things like brand names or mentions of branded services and price-related queries. Here they know what they want, the product or service, they just need to be convinced to part with their money
Action at this point, users will go straight to brand or commerce websites. Users usually go directly to the provider, but if searches do happen, they will show strong intent in the form of words like Buy, book, Order, Trial, Demo
