12 Oct Does Social Media Actually Drive Sales? How to Prove It with Data.

The Question Every Brand Asks

One of the most common questions we hear from brands is: how do we connect our social media efforts to business results and/or sales?

For brands with direct e-commerce, the answer can be fairly straightforward. For everyone else, it gets complicated fast. Maybe people discover your product on social but often buy it in store. Maybe they scroll social and then make the purchase later. The customer journey can look very different from one brand to the next, and there are real attribution roadblocks to work through.

The good news is that you can move beyond social metrics to show the impact of your social, you just have to find creative solutions for bridging these gaps.

Why Social Metrics Aren’t Enough

Too many brands stop at likes, followers, impressions, and engagements. Those numbers matter, but they only tell you that people saw and reacted to your content. They do not tell you whether it influenced any action.

The real work is connecting social activity to what happens next, whether someone exposed to your brand on social is more likely to consider or purchase than someone who didn’t.

Start with the Right Question

At the onset of our strategies, we always ask the question: “Fast forward a year from now, what does success look like?”, and we have clients rate from 1-5 whether they want to drive Awareness, Engage

ment, Consideration, or Purchase. Not-so-surprising, we often find clients will put 5 for every metric. When we ask about this rating, it’s clear that Purchase is thei

r top metric, and they are just hoping that an inc

rease in awareness and engagement will naturally drive it.

As a result, we’ve discovered a few different ways to measure whether social is moving that needle.

Approach 1: On-Platform Brand Lift Studies

Most major social platforms offer brand lift studies, including Meta, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, and Snapchat. When people hear “brand lift,” they usually think of awareness. And for well-known brands, the pushback is fair: if everyone already knows us, how much lift can we really expect?

What makes these studies valuable is that they also measure consideration and purchase intent. They ask whether people who saw your content are more likely to buy. That is the signal that can help us bridge the gap.

The catch is cost. These studies require media spend minimums, and they are not small. Current minimums we are seeing:

Note: Media OOP minimums change regularly, please always contact each platform for their latest rates

There are some encouraging developments. Reddit now offers a predictive brand lift using AI for a minimum spend of $5k, and YouTube has also developed brand lift studies that ask 1-3 questions at prices scaling from $10k-60k.

Still, many clients may not meet these minimums based on their media/channel strategy, which pushed us to find other options.

Approach 2: Independent Studies

When platform studies are out of reach, we work with third-party research partners. The method is similar: a test group sees the content, a control group does not, and b

oth answer a survey. We then compare responses on questions to understand the impact to brand consideration and purchase actio

n intent.

Some of these studies are simulated, so the content appears inside a mock version of the platform. Others can be run in-market which serves your ads in a live campaign and then surveys them against a control that wasn’t. Which study is best fits depends on your goals and budget, and pricing depends on how many creative assets you test and how the survey is designed.

These studies are usually more affordable than platform brand lift studies, but keep in mind that the price typically does not include media costs.

Approach 3: Sales Lift Testing

This is where we get closest to hard sales numbers for brands that can access retail sales at particular locations. In this case, we partner with brand managers to isolate specific geographies and measure actual sales.

Here is how it works:

1. Pick three test DMAs that will run the influencer and social program.
2. Pick three matched control DMAs that receive no program exposure.
3. Concentrate media spend in the test markets only.
4. Pull daily sales data from one retailer at a time and compare test markets against control.
   
   

We have used this approach with brands including Gorilla Glue, Revlon, and Laura’s Lean. The requirement is access to daily sales data from your chosen retailer. Not every brand has that, but when they do, it is one of the most convincing ways to prove impact. And once a brand proves results in a few markets, it has the evidence it needs to roll the program out nationally.

On the Horizon: Retail Media Integrations

Recently, TikTok has also partnered with Instacart on a new Beta for shoppable ads that let customers add items directly to their cart, connecting social exposure to actual purchases. Like the lift studies, this feature costs a pretty penny and it’s still in Beta for select advertisers.

On the flip side, retailers and delivery platforms such as Walmart, Kroger, Instacart, and DoorDash are beginning to offer self-serve off-site media campaigns across Meta, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and more. Several of these retailers are launching beta self-serve advertising and the promise of closed-loop reporting for some of their offerings. The idea is that you buy paid social media using the retailer’s audience targets, usually at a slightly higher CPM, and in return you can track those impressions through to actual sales. It is a promising alternative for brands that sell mostly in store, though it’s still fairly new and rolling out.

In Practice

Curious how we’ve made the connection to sales across various clients? We’ve compiled the following:

Laura’s Lean. Laura’s Lean was competing against store brand beef, so reaching shoppers was not enough. We needed to move them to reach for Laura’s Lean at shelf. We ran a year-long social and influencer program that also drove awareness of specific Kroger locations carrying the brand. A sales lift analysis showed a 22% sales lift above benchmark. A Meta brand lift study showed an 8.2% lift in purchase intent and an 11.9% lift in brand favorability.

Tangle. We ran four creator campaigns on TikTok alongside retail activations at Kroger, BJ’s, and Costco. Our brand lift study showed a 15-point increase in purchase intent and $777K in forecasted revenue from just one of those retailers.

Gorilla Glue. We geo-targeted influencer and agency-created content to 1,230 zip codes in trade-heavy markets, with matched markets held out as a control so retailer sales data could show the difference. The program generated a 7.6% sales lift in test DMAs, and two weeks after it ended, a 6.9% lift remained.

The Takeaway: Prove It Small, Then Scale

There is no single right way to connect social media to sales. The best method depends on your budget, your data access, and where your customers actually buy. To recap, you can:

• Use platform brand lift studies to track increases in purchase intent.
• Run independent studies with research partners to test your creative’s effectiveness to drive purchase intent.
• Measure sales lift using your own retailer sales data in test and control markets.

Whatever you choose, continue to push to look beyond social channel metrics. Start with a focused test, prove the impact, and use that proof to scale what works.

Interested in discussing how we can help you make a closer connection to sales? Contact us, we’d love to help.