Are you struggling to measure social media ROI? Do you struggle to explain how social media is helping to grow the business?
You’re not alone.
Pinning down return on investment (ROI) for social media is difficult to do, but not impossible. Showing that your social strategy is working — even if it’s impossible to get a dollar amount — is necessary if you’re going to prove its effectiveness. After all, clients are investing in your services, and they want to see their money working for them.
This article will break down, once and for all, how to measure social media ROI. I’ll give you step by step instruction on how to determine your social media goals and measure your success.
Why is measuring social media ROI so hard?
One challenge in measuring ROI for your social campaigns lies in the fact that many campaigns result in interactions on the client’s social outlets, rather than on their business website. Yet these interactions on these social media sites have a considerable offline impact.
Social media, when well-executed, provides a business with a variety of tangible and intangible benefits:
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Increases brand recognition
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Provides social proof – “look at all the fans/followers Company X has. I should follow them too!”
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Increases your customer base
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Encourages engagement between the business and its customers, either via the social network itself or by increasing the number of calls received
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Opens the doors to and facilitates great customer service
To prove that your social campaign is accomplishing all this though, you need to measure the impact of your campaigns and make that hard sell to your boss.
Let’s get into how you can do that.
Determine Your Social Media Goals
Before you can track and measure the results of your campaigns, you need to set realistic goals. What are you hoping to achieve through your social media efforts? More brand recognition? Increased website traffic? A larger base of brand advocates?
Some businesses may initially advocate for increased sales and leads as a high priority goal, but it is important to remember that social is first and foremost about reputation and relationship building. Sales may come from these efforts in the long run, but to expect this upfront sets you up for disappointment.
When setting these goals, consider what other aspects you can benefit from with social. For example, social media often helps boost general public relations efforts as well as improve customer service. By identifying areas where you or a client wants to see growth, you’ll better be able to target more effective social strategies.
In order to determine the effectiveness of your efforts, you have to track everything (and I mean everything):
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Online purchases
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Online contact forms
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EBook downloads
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Video views,
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Social interactions (from a growing Twitter following to more Facebook likes, to name just a few)
All this can be tracked with ingrained platform insights or simple Google Analytics custom reports. But what are some steps you can implement easily?
1. Tag Your URLs Obsessively
While you can invest in a variety of social media analytics tools, that’s not necessarily required. You need a way to measure your campaigns, and campaign-tagged URLs are a great, and fairly simple, way to do this.
Tagging your URLs is also a necessary step in tracking, especially if you want to monitor website views coming from social apps. If you don’t use unique URLs for your campaigns, any visitor from a social media app will be seen as an organic view, not one that comes from a social network. You don’t want all your hard work to go unnoticed!
To create these campaign-tagged URLs for every social campaign you do, use Google’s URL builder. For example, you can A/B test each of your ad campaigns on Facebook, such as one URL for your paid Facebook ads, and a different URL for your status updates.
But the tagged URLs don’t end there. For every social media site you should be tagging your URLs, whether they’re for YouTube videos or for Twitter. If there’s ever a time to be compulsively detailed and invest some time in tracking, the time is now.
One example of a company using Google’s URL builder to track how their social media campaigns are working is Mike Ferry, which offers real estate coaching. The company specifically tags its URLs to see which Facebook ads are most effective at getting visitors to inquire about classes; this is then measured by how many people fill out a form.
By tracking what URLs followers click on, the business has obtained valuable insight into which campaigns work best with its audience. Here is an example of the Google URL builder being used for one of their campaigns:
To take this a step further and put a monetary amount on how much these social media efforts are paying off, you can create goals for each of these campaigns and then assign values to their completion. You can decide on the value either based on the results you usually see from these sorts of campaigns, or ask what value your client wants to assign to them.
If you’re deciding on the values, there are simple formulas you can use. Here’s just one such formula:
For example, if your sales team typically closes a sale with 5% of the people who download their free eBook, and if the average sale is $250, you could assign a dollar value of $12.50 to each free eBook download goal (calculated by taking 5% of $250); that goal is considered complete once they fill out the registration for the eBook and then the download is complete.
2. Install and Monitor Google Analytics to Track Social Media Traffic
Another way to monitor the source of traffic to your client’s website is for the client’s programmer to install Google Analytics on their site. Once that’s installed, you can visit Google Analytics and under “Acquisition,” you can check “All Referrals.” This will list where people are coming from when they visit your site, whether it be from an organic search on Google or from a social site like Facebook.
Google Analytics also allows you to set up social campaign goals to track your referral traffic. In doing so, it will also track actions that you want your users to complete, whether it’s a download or newsletter sign-up, for example.
Additionally, Google Analytics can also interface with other sites in order to measure click-throughs to the business’s website. When setting up a Constant Contact email blast, with a few keystrokes you can name the campaign; then you can see how many people visit your client’s site based on that particular email newsletter blast. This gives you concrete numbers to provide to your client.
3. Set Up Call Tracking
Call tracking is another way to measure your ROI for your social media campaigns. This is often done with Facebook ad campaigns, although it can be done with other social accounts too. This functionality effectively allows you directly measure the calls you’re getting due to your social media sites. This is possible because your social media page will list a different business phone number than what is on your business’ website, which is what 12 Keys Rehab does with its Facebook page and website: