Organic vs. Paid: Reading the Same Week Two Ways

Marketing Academy · Field Work●Social Media Marketing

All projects·From: Organic vs. Paid Social

MiniHead-to-Head· 25 minutes

Flipkart

Objective: Given one week of organic and paid social metrics for the same brand, decide which channel is actually working by applying each channel's own KPI set, not a shared one.

You're a social media analyst at Flipkart, the Bengaluru-founded horizontal ecommerce marketplace, reviewing last week's Instagram performance before the quarterly budget review.

You have organic post metrics (reach, saves, shares, comments) and paid campaign metrics (CPM, CPC, CPA, ROAS) from the same week and same platform. Leadership wants a one-line verdict: is social 'working'? Apply the lesson's rule that organic and paid are judged on different KPIs, never compared on the same number.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets

FreeImport and compare organic and paid exports side by side

Free, no account friction, handles two small weekly exports easily

Meta Ads Manager

FreeSource of the paid campaign export (CPM, CPC, CPA, ROAS)

Native reporting for the paid side of the same week

The process

1 step

Step 01 of 01

Assigning organic and paid different jobs and KPIs

The lesson's Step 3 splits measurement by channel: organic on saves, shares, DMs, and profile visits; paid on CPC, CPA, and ROAS. Judging organic by reach or paid by likes hides the real signal.

Organic reach fell 9% week-over-week but saves rose 22%. Paid CPA rose 15% but ROAS held at 3.2x. Is this a bad week for social?

Google Sheets— Two tabs, one exported from Instagram Insights (organic), one exported from Meta Ads Manager (paid), same date range.

Procedure

Import both exports into separate sheet tabs, keep the date range identical
On the organic tab, ignore the reach column entirely and rank posts by saves-to-reach ratio
On the paid tab, ignore CPM and rank campaigns by ROAS against the 3x profitability floor
Write one verdict per channel, never a single combined verdict

Sample output

ORGANIC
  Reach: -9% WoW (not the metric that matters)
  Saves: +22% WoW <- real signal, creative is resonating
  Verdict: working, keep testing this format

PAID
  CPA: +15% WoW (creative fatigue, watch closely)
  ROAS: 3.2x (above 3x floor)
  Verdict: working, but flag CPA trend for next week

Healthy

Two separate verdicts, each grounded in that channel's own KPI set.

Unhealthy

One combined 'social is up/down' number that averages reach and ROAS together.

What this means

A reach dip with a saves increase is a healthy sign, not a red flag; a rising CPA with ROAS still above floor is a watch item, not a crisis.

So what do I do about it?

Symptom	Action	Effort
Leadership asks for one social media score	Present organic and paid verdicts side by side instead of blending them	5 min
CPA keeps climbing while ROAS is still above floor	Flag it now and refresh the ad creative before ROAS actually drops	30 min

YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Final deliverable

A one-page channel scorecard with two independent verdicts (organic, paid) and the specific metric that drove each verdict.

See a reference example

Sample output

HelloFresh, Instagram week-of-8/11 scorecard

ORGANIC
  Reach: 1.1% of followers (expected, not a red flag)
  Saves: +18% WoW on the new recipe-hack Reel format
  Verdict: Working. Scale the recipe-hack format next week.

PAID
  ROAS: 2.7x (below 3x floor)
  CPA: $34, up from $29
  Verdict: Not working. Pause the underperforming ad set before adding budget.

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

Produces two separate verdicts, one per channel, never a blended score
Correctly identifies that a reach drop with rising saves is not a failure signal
Flags the paid campaign by ROAS against the 3x floor, not by CPM or impressions