A recent report from Social Media Examiner, showed that 96% of marketers are using social media, but only 42% said they were able to measure its ROI.
If you’ve been able to get away with saying you play on Twitter and Facebook all day without applying a commercial value to this, then fair play to you, you must have extraordinary skills of persuasion. But if you need a little help showing your boss or investor that social media is a worthwhile pursuit, we’ve got measuring ROI covered with these 5 steps…
1. Decide what you want to measure
Is it purchase of a product? Blog visits? Voucher downloads? Video views or something else? Without a clear idea of what you want social to do for you, there’s no chance you can measure its success. Your social goals should be aligned with your business goals, whether it’s increasing awareness of your brand, targeting a particular demographic or the most obvious, increasing sales.
2. Create Conversion Goals in Google Analytics
Once you understand what you want people to do on your site, you need to set these ‘tasks’ up as Conversion Goals. Conversions might include reaching to the sales confirmation page on your site, clicking on a link, sharing a post or signing up to an email list. You can add a value to your Conversions, so for example if you know your average basket spend is £50, you can set this as the Conversion’s value. Then you’ll be able to get a good estimate of how much your social media campaign actually made in figures.
3. Install Conversion Tracking
This will tell you exactly how many people reached your desired landing pages from social media adverts. By connecting your social ads with your website, you’ll get direct, live feedback of how many people are reaching these landing pages and you can then test and tailor adverts against each other to see which is most effective.
4. Use promo codes
Leaking a social only promo code ‘i.e. get 10% off when you use the code FACEBOOK’ will give you an accurate measurement of the quality of you social media audience and how likely they are to convert. You could try this across different platforms to compare your best performing social channels, or across different methods i.e. Email vs Social, Google ads vs Social, Facebook vs Twitter, with a different code for each.
5. Track your website traffic from social media using Google Analytics
Even if you don’t have an online checkout, you should still monitor your social media traffic to your website. Using Google Analytics, you can compare any time period i.e. month by month, or year by year. So if you’ve been ramping up your social media efforts over the last year, this should be reflected in your social media traffic- providing you remember to include call to action links within your social posts that drive people to your site.
Sound good? It should do. If you need help getting to grips with the value of your social media efforts, give us a buzz on 0161 8723455 and speak to Becky
