Campaign evaluation made easy by social listening

Running a promotion, launching a new project or a new marketing campaign is always a time of hope and risk, with wins and/or learning points along the way. But you need precise tools to get to the bottom of the matter and track KPIs. Through the example of the German government's famous 9-Euro-Ticket, we’ll show you what social listening can do!

When you’re running a campaign on multiple platforms, plus your customers are also talking about your brand or services in various online hubs, it is nearly impossible to manually aggregate all the data that would reveal the insights you desperately need. This is especially true when a lot depends on your actions, and you need quick feedback on how to take (or not to take) the next step in the campaign. To track your progress, you need to set up marketing KPIs that actually help you understand your performance, instead of just shiny vanity metrics without true meaning. That also gives a strong fundament to finetune forthcoming campaigns.

The good news is, there is a great solution to following your campaign’s reception, and do so in real time: use a social listening tool - like Neticle Media Intelligence – to automatically collect all the public online mentions of your campaign.

Neticle Media Intelligence also performs thorough text- and data analysis (including sentiment analysis) on all the collected text, visualizes the results for you in highly customizable charts, and reveals all crucial metrics. Your campaign-related decisions become 100% data-driven!

What can we learn about the 9-Euro-Ticket, as well as your campaigns?

• What was the most engaging content?

The posts that collected the highest number of interactions (likes, reactions, comments, shares etc.) are the ones considered to be the most engaging, and often, this is your most successful content. Therefore, it’s important to know what gets your audience to stop scrolling and interact in some way.

In the case of the 9-Euro-Ticket, Instagram posts got the highest engagement (especially ones by the news portal @tagesschau), while Deutsche Bahn (whose trains the ticket was also valid for) had success with its own TikTok channel as well as with user generated content.

• How much did users interact with your posts and others mentioning your campaign?

The daily number of interactions (likes/reactions, comments, shares) with posts mentioning 9-Euro-Ticket and Deutsche Bahn

We can look at engagement in a different way as well: when we zoom out from individual posts, a pattern of daily engagement (the daily number of interactions) appears, in this case examined between the 1^st of April and the 16^th of September 2022. It’s visible that in August – as the 9-Euro-Ticket promotion was about to end – the number of interactions skyrocketed, reaching a daily amount of 3 to 5 million on some days.

• Which posts got the highest number of shares?

The most shared mentions

The way for some content to become viral is by sharing it, of course, and the platforms that make content sharing the easiest are Twitter (retweets), Facebook and TikTok. So of course, these are the ones appearing on the 9-Euro-Ticket’s chart as well, serving several valuable lessons to those behind the campaign:

passengers really didn’t want the promotion to end.

• Which platform was the most effective and useful in helping you reach your goals?

One of the several important metrics in campaign evaluation is learning how many users your content has potentially reached. The chart above shows just that, but it also breaks it down to platforms, revealing that articles and Twitter spread the word the farthest this time.

• How did the campaign influence the perception of your brand overall?

The Daily Web Opinion Index

With Neticle Media Intelligence’s built-in sentiment analysis, we can see how the online mood related to any topic changes. The perception of the 9-Euro-Ticket fluctuated very much in both directions, but overall spent slightly more in the negative zone. Deutsche Bahn’s reputation was also in the negative zone on most days, and the availability of the cheap ticket didn’t do much to change it, unfortunately.

Want to learn more? Click here to book a demo and have your campaign analyzed!