Social Media Measurment: What To Measure And How

Social media marketing works…it’s just hard to know what part is working best. With literally unlimited opportunities to participate and use social media, you need to know what is effective to dial in your efforts and become more efficient over time. Read more

Does Social Media Measure Up?

Social media is not voodoo marketing. It ’s a new way of marketing using the distributed and social web to cast a wide net and ultimately drive prospects into your purchase funnel. The great thing about social media marketing is it doesn’t cost a huge amount of money to try new things.  So, the idea is to have various of elements of a strategy working together to build a powerful new marketing channel for your business.

The key to making this all work is tracking. You need to have good measurement so you can make adjustments along the way. Eliminate wasted activity and do more of what is working. Chris Brogan recently posted about how he approaches measurement with clients in the context of a social media marketing engagement. I found that post very helpful. Here are some key metrics we focus on:

What is tracking?

1. Keeping track of specific measurements or metrics
2. Keeping track of customers and prospects

In other words, tracking is keeping track of results…novel idea, accountability in social media!

But, Social media is not a science

• It’s important to take action, then see if/what works
• Based on our experience we know that most anything will work (improve results), the question is return on time and effort
• The important thing to know is we do not have to be OPTIMAL to launch. Since the costs associated with doing any one thing is so low, with the right measurement, we can make adjustments quickly

So, why measure and track?

• Know what you are doing is working
• Know what you are doing is not working
• Know what your market is doing in reaction to what you are doing
• Have data upon which to make clear decisions
• If you don’t track, you can’t improve

What to Track?

Everything that leads up to a sale or action;

• Lead sources/traffic sources- how well they work
• Conversion (what converts)

Track Traffic

• Know how much traffic comes from each lead source
• How well each of those sources perform
• Cost per lead
• Velocity of results
• Absolute number of leads (changes versus prior periods)

Site visits

• Who came in to your site and from where
• How long did they stay
• what did they look at
• What actions they took
• Did they buy
• What did they buy
• Where they leave (bounce from page)
• Where they stick

Ratios

• Email/contact to visitor
• Visitor to opt-in
• Opt-in to purchase/Inquiry
• Email/contacts to purchase
• Lead to qualified lead
• Lead to purchase/customer

Key lead Gen Metrics

• Cost per lead
• Cost per customer
• Cost per revenue dollar

Measurement and tracking tools

• Google Analytics and Conversion tracker- Track traffic and sources to your site
• Hypertracker- Tracking management system for marketing
• Your shopping cart system and/or autoresponder
• Budurl- Track links on all your distributed content
• Clicktail- Heat maps and click-stream data for your website
• Feedburner- RSS tracker

Now get started…you will be a much better social media marketer because of it.

Their are tons of tracking tools available. What are your favorite?