Social Media Analytics - Going Beyond the Like
Using social media to grow your business is something all businesses are doing, whether you’re just starting out, or are a large corporation, being on a social platform is a must.
The question I pose to you is.
Do you know if it’s working?
It’s great to see the increase in follower count, the comments, re-tweets, or shares. But is this leading to actual sales?
This is where your analytics comes into play.
In this post, I’m going to be discussing the importance of not just looking at your social media vanity metrics, but to go further and take a look at how your social media traffic performs on your site.
By the end of this post, you’ll be able to go in and find out if your social media traffic is ‘showing you the money’!
After all, you’re in the business of making money and if something is not doing this, it’s time to course correct and/or eliminate.
Social media vanity metrics
Gone are the days when all you needed was a ton of followers, some likes and re-tweets to get people to buy your products or do another highly valuable action on your site.
The changes in the algorithm of the various platforms (i.e Instagram), and the monetization of certain tactics (i.e. Facebook pages), things are now quite different and getting in front of your customers, let alone getting them to buy has become more difficult.
It’s very easy for someone to double tap your post or press the share button to blast it on their wall, without it actually translating into $$.
Getting them to click on to be taken to your site is where the money is at.
The ultimate goal for your social media campaign is to make this happen.
How to measure social media success
Time to start thinking and looking at the metrics that will truly give you information on how your social media is performing.
For this, you’ll be using your Google Analytics account. If you do not have a Google Analytics account, I highly recommend you add one to your site. There’re many resources available on YouTube that will walk you through how to add it to your account.
If you already have Google Analytics set up, great! Let’s get to the fun stuff!
First things first...it’s important to define the goal of your website and your business.
What does this mean?
Well, if you’re an online retail store, the goal of the site is to drive purchases. On the other hand, if you offer a service, perhaps the goal of the site is for visitors to book a call with you.
It’s important to define all the relevant goals on your site. If you’re able to create Google Analytics goals your life will be 1000x better. Trust me!
To read up on Google Analytics goals and to see which goals you should have, you can read my post here.
Here are some ideas for you when it comes to potential site goals:
Register for newsletter
Request opt-in material
Complete purchase
Create user account
Submit a lead
Book a call
Download important document (it’s best if they need to provide an email address, but even without this, it shows engagement and interest with your content)
Register for a class/workshop/course
Once you have identified what the goal(s) of your site are, you can then measure how your social media traffic is performing against these.
Measuring Performance
If you’re not able to create Google Analytics goals, you will have to do more manual work to get at the information. Still doable, it will just take more clicks to get to your data.
For the purpose of this post, I’m going to assume you have google analytics goals created in your account.
Alright!, time to get at the data.
To make things so much easier, I have created a video for you, were I walk you through how to get to the important metrics.
Just press play!
There you have it! It’s that easy to have a quick view into the performance of your social media channels.
My recommendation is to use this as a starting point, but to get a comprehensive understanding of performance you will have to do more analysis.
From here you can start looking at each source and understand what is and isn’t working. You should also trend your data to see whether there is growth or decline in the performance. You can also look at each one by various segments (i.e New vs Returning traffic, landing page, etc). To learn more about segments and which ones to look at, click here to read the blog post I wrote on them.
There you have it folks!
Now, all that’s left is for you to start looking into how your social media traffic is performing and make any changes you need to make to have it be a driving force in growing your business!
Tell me, have you taken a look at your metrics?
Or do you have any questions on this topic?
Share in the comments if you do!
Happy Analyzing!