How to Measure Social Media Marketing
Tracking the success of an organic SEO campaign is quite straightforward for ecommerce sites but the rise of social media marketing is leaving a lot of people scratching their heads and wondering how to track social campaigns.
The first task in any campaign has to be to work out the goals. Without goals it is impossible to measure success. Below are some common goals for a social media campaign along with an explanation of how to track them.
Improving Google rankings (linkbait)
The best way to improve your Google rankings is to get as many high quality natural links as possible. Releasing interesting content and promoting it using social news websites can lead to a lot of links but how do you track it?
My first method is to estimate a value for each link you get. For example a link from a leading tech blog is worth maybe £200. Add up the links you get to an article and you can see a direct ROI. This method is somewhat difficult as only SEO professionals can accurately estimate the value of a link.
Another method is to measure increases in traffic and sales as your rankings for a particular keyword improve. This is a good method but rankings don’t always change, even after a successful campaign.
Building a blog / newsletter readership
Tracking blog and newsletter subscribers can be accomplished using Google Analytics quite easily. Placing a value on each new subscriber is tricky but once you have a set value tracking a campaign is easy.
Building traffic levels for branding
Traffic levels are easy to monitor but hard to measure in terms of value. One method is to place a arbitrary value on each visitor and add up the totals at the end of the campaign. To gauge the values of each visitor it is useful to look at the number of pages they viewed on your site. For example Diggers have low value and only view 1.1 pages whereas visitors from a blog in your niche might view 3 pages.
Making ecommerce sales
Assuming a site is tracking sales right down to the visitor source and keyword this method of measuring ROI is very straightforward. Write a list of all possible sources that are sending traffic as a direct result of your campaign and drill down into your stats to find the sales figures.
Of course any social media campaign will probably result in sales, subscribers, links and traffic so the key is to place a value on all these variables before the campaign launches and track everything as you proceed.
