When people start participating in social media, the most common sentiment is that it is a waste of time. The more social media becomes a part of our online activities, the more brands start to participate.
However, many still view it as a burden, something they have to do to promote their website. Reluctance comes from the fact that it is difficult to measure how well you are doing with your social efforts.
It is important to remember that there are two ways people can engage with your company. You will track each of them separately and will analyze them differently.
- Traffic source: social. Visitors come to your website from a variety of social sites (YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit, etc.)
- Site engagement. People can also interact with your website's content. They can like your blog post on Facebook, tweet about it, share it on Google Plus. When they distribute your content to their social network they become socially engaged on your website.
Let's talk about measuring the effort and putting a monetary value on your social campaigns. I am not going to talk about specific metrics. Social media goals vary and so do the measurements. Instead, I will talk about the general approach to analyzing your success and what's necessary to get the data you need.
The process is not complicated. First, you need to make sure that you track your efforts. Second, you need to collect data. And third, gather valuable lessons for your business.
URL tagging
In case you do not know why you should tag all URLs that you share, here is the reason.
Apps like TweetDeck or mobile Twitter do not pass referrer code to an analytics tool (Google Analytics, Omniture, any tool).
If you do not tag your URLs, all clicks to your website will come through as direct traffic. Therefore, when you distribute a link to your site anywhere - in a press release, on Twitter or Facebook, email newsletter - always tag it appropriately. Google URL Builder will help you.
Measuring
Social traffic
You can create a general tag for social media (utm_source=social-media) or specify each source by name (utm_source=twitter, utm_source=facebook, etc) for each URL you send out. Then, create a custom segment in your Analytics to include all social media traffic sources. The filter will include your tags and the the traffic from the actual websites (Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, and other sites).
Now you can apply your segment to any report - visitor frequency & recency report or engagement report (in Audience Behavior). You will be able to see different patterns of behavior among social and not social visitors. The behavior will be different and you will be able to see which content is more attractive to each group.
Multi-Channel Funnels
Multi-channel funnels is where we start seeing real money attached to the social media campaigns. Go to Conversions -> Multi-channel funnels -> Overview and look at a Venn diagram illustrating interactions of your marketing channels. It shows them all working as a team. These are the channels that closed the deal.
Often, people do not convert right away. Assisted conversions tab will show how much social networks contributed to achieving your main goals. The number that should bring tears of joy to your eyes is Assisted Conversion Value by Social Network channel. This is just a part of return on your social media investment.
Social engagement
One of the recent addition to Google Analytics is Social Engagement Reporting. You will need to do some coding, but the benefits are well worth it.
Social Engagement report allows you to find out not only how many people shared your content (socially engaged), but also discover what type of engagement it was - share, Facebook like, unlike, send, tweet, etc. Lookfor pages that are most engaging and build on them.
If you would like to learn more about what metrics to keep an eye on to measure your efforts in social media, check out a post by Avinash Kaushik - Best Social Media Metrics. In addition, I also like to track number media inquiries, online citations, and other off-line metrics for branding social media campaigns.
Drawing conclusions
You need to know the value of Social Media to your business to get funding. People rarely come to your website throgh social media and buy something right away. Social media is the glue that holds together your online reputation. Social media is good at establishing a relationship with your brand. It can be used to instill trust in your product. Nobody said it is easy to measure value of a relationship.
What is your next step? You should be examining your mobile strategy success. Single out mobile traffic on your website and find out how socially engaged the visitors are. If your numbers are not impressive, you have your work cut out for you.
How successful are you in your social media efforts? What are your favorite metrics to measure your success?
Best Follow-up Reads:
Lyena-
Great information. I’ve always tried to track all my traffic. I want to know what everything that comes into my site is. I’ve used gate way pages and other cumbersome methods to track social media but I really like your coding aspect.
Would this code go in the HTML of the page you want tracked?
(utm_source=social-media)
Thanks
sean
Putting code in the link is very easy even though it demands dedication because you have to do it to every link to your site that distribute.
The URL you share is coded, not the page. For example, you wrote a post on your blog: http://yourdomain.com/social-media and you want to share it with your followers on Twitter. Instead of sending the link above, you send out this link: http://mydomain.com/?utm_source=social-media&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=blog . Google URL builder mentioned above helps and explains the parameters.
The only advice I can give is to be consistent. Decide ahead of time what those parameters can be. Then, be consistent in your tagging.
Glad my suggestions made your life easier. Happy tracking!
I have started following your blog because I am trying to get ranked. Your post is for businesses and helping them, but for guys like me that just want to get their site to rank to provide information, this is a great place to get that information. My information site needs help with social. Thanks for the tips.
Nice idea with the URL tagging will have to give that a try.
Paul and Jim –
Thank you for your comments. Even though tracking is not going to help you rank, it will show you where to focus when you try to acquire traffic. It will help you zero down on the audience that is most receptive to your offerings. That’s usually a very good start to a prosperous future.
Hi Lyena,
I have always believed that you should source all your traffic. And what’s better than being able to gauge what they like. And, with your help all of this is very possible. You are so right about Social Media establishing your reputation. They help with your brand and keep you in front of new people all the time. Excellent article and instructions.
Thank you very much for your comment, Ann! If I was able to make your job easier – mission accomplished. There are so many channels these days that we have to look at how all of them contribute to the revenue – in concert and separately. Tracking marketing efforts is essential for making decisions.
Hi Lyena,
Exactly, so that you don’t make the wrong decision! Revenue sometimes comes from places least expected! Thanks for replying. I appreciate it. And, you definitely accomplished your mission.
awesome trick, I was ignore about the url tagging, thanks for sharing the trick