Title: Recruiting Participants through Social Media 4

Use multiple data sources to monitor and analyze your campaign.

Facebook provides details on how your ads are being seen and consumed, but it may not tell a full story. Use Bit.ly, Facebook Pixel, and Google Analytics Tags to learn how people consume your ads, and where they go from there. For example, Facebook indicated the number of people who clicked on the ad, while Bit.ly and Pixel indicated the number of people who actually landed on our study webpage. Google Analytics tag told us how they navigated through our study website and where they dropped off.

Select your analysis metrics strategically.

So much data, so little time. Familiarize yourself with the different metrics Facebook offers. Monitor them weekly as some metrics (e.g., Pixel codes) expire and disappear every 7 days. Decide whether you want to monitor number of clicks, impressions, relevance, etc.  For example, likes may not be the best metric if you are ultimately aiming to enroll users on your study. In other words, just because they like an image doesn’t mean they’ll click through to the ad.