Hollie-Blue Allum
Hollie-Blue Allum
September 28, 2015

Earned Impressions are one of the most valuable metrics for optimizing your paid content campaigns, they are any impressions that arise from a social share.

This metric can help you to pick top performing content for promotion that can help extend your campaign reach. However, what do you do if your content’s not bringing in high earned impressions?

Earned Impressions – Tips & Tricks 

Note: If you’re agency or brand side, make sure that you’re reviewing the share copy when signing off creative. It’s that important. But don’t forget about it once it’s live, if it’s not working, ask the publisher to change it.

Starting Point

Review your paid content to find out which pieces are bringing in less than 20% of their impressions from earned. These are the pieces we’re going to optimize.

Headline

This is important and if people aren’t clicking through this is one of the first things to change. Make sure that your headline stands out in social and that it’s descriptive and uses context words. Find more info here on content words: http://nativeadvertising.com/contextwords/

Share Image

This normally pulls in an image from the article. Check is it the right one, are there others you could trial, how about a different crop. What will make this stand out more? Think of your share & headline like Social SEO, you want people to click through from the feed.

About Copy

This is the text that sits underneath the headline. A lot of publishers either just pull in the first sentence from the article or leave this blank. This is a great space to help sell your content. You can create a snappy sentence that explains the content and gives a layer of intrigue so readers want to click through to uncover more.

Optimize 

During your paid content campaign, check in daily to see which pieces need optimization. Review headline, image and about copy for each piece of content to see if edits will increase your secondary audience. Make changes, review results, and take learnings. A native content campaign isn’t completed after go live. The audience will tell you the optimizations needed to increase your campaign performance. Listen.

Example 

Here’s an example of a strong piece of share copy: 7 Things People Who Love Coffee Do Better Than You

Though it does just pull in the first sentence in the about copy, it’s the perfect length and clearly sets the emotion for the rest of the article. The picture stands out for a female reader and the headline uses a list structure which we know performs well on social.

This piece of content had over 25K shares on Facebook, basing this off Nudge data we would have expected to see over 75,000 earned impressions from Facebook alone. Showing that well crafted share headline, about copy and image can drive the right users to your content.

If you have any questions on this post please either place them in the comments below or email them through to hollie@giveitanudge.com


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