Celebrities are bemoaning lack of engagement on social media, young people are leaving Instagram in droves, and Facebook is trying to lure influencers with payouts. In an increasingly jaded landscape, relying on social media engagement numbers — likes, follows, reactions — doesn’t necessarily seem like the best idea. And yet, these so-called “vanity metrics” are often the go-to measure of success among many marketing managers.
Relying on engagement can be especially problematic when a deadly infection is at stake, as demonstrated by new research from Columbia Business School Professor Dante Donati, Nandan Rao of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and Victor Orozco-Olvera and Ana Maria Muñoz Boudet of the World Bank.
The research focused on the effects of a Facebook and Instagram ad campaign highlighting malaria prevention behaviors in India. The team found that while the campaign succeeded in achieving its goals among rich and urban households, it had little impact on poor and rural ones — the very demographics most affected by malaria. The key to this disparity was an overreliance on engagement.
“With social media engagement, there is a kind of income divide,” Donati says. “And this divide works against the advertiser or the campaign.”
A focus on engagement may backfire
The researchers studied malaria-preventing behaviors – such as sleeping under mosquito nets – in response to the organization Malaria No More’s Facebook ads that were automatically optimized to be shown to users with higher social media engagement. That means the ads were more likely to reach individuals who react more often on social media — usually those who can afford better internet connections and have more time and data to browse online.
“These are the people who are already at low risk of malaria,” Donati notes. “Engagement optimization isn't really ideal in this context because the ads don't go to the ones who need them the most.”
In a second experiment, the researchers found that when poorer and higher-risk individuals did see the ad, it made them much more likely to take malaria-preventing actions. That is, the ad design was successful, but engagement optimization prevented its delivery to the right people.
One reason for this is that engagement optimization in this market made the campaign relatively cheap. Further analysis conducted by the researchers found that it cost almost twice as much to ensure that a poorer or rural individual in India saw the ad.
Aligning incentives with desired outcomes
While the study reveals a sobering downside of using vanity metrics to measure success in public health advertising, Donati also warns that overreliance on engagement can be limiting for any organization. “Try to use metrics that are as close as possible to the actual value you care about,” he suggests.
For example, relevant metrics for corporations might be downstream product sales, customer retention or the lifetime value of a customer. These datapoints may not be as readily available as engagement numbers generated by the click of a button, but they’ll almost certainly lead to marketing efforts that deliver better long-term results.
Building capacity to measure outcomes that really matter may require shifting incentives within marketing departments so that reward structures are not tied to engagement metrics. In the case of public health, it may require a complementary offline campaign to maximize results in high-risk areas.
“What outcomes do we prioritize?” Donati asks. “That’s the open question: advertisers and platforms may have divergent answers.”
