1. Begin by defining your goals and measuring their return on social media.

To know which metrics are relevant to you and which will help you establish your ROI, you need to know what you want to achieve.

More traffic? More leads or subscribers?  reach and engage with your audience?

Accurately measuring your results is only possible once you know what you want to accomplish.

You are using social media marketing to help you achieve your business objectives, so start by considering what these are.

You can begin outlining your social media objectives as soon as you have a firm understanding of your company’s objectives. Be very specific about what you want to achieve and adjust your goals as you go along; for example, you might focus your attention for a month on raising your social media traffic by 20%, but that isn’t sustainable in the long run. Or you might notice that Twitter drives considerably more traffic than other social networks; in that case, you could adjust your strategy to focus more on Twitter than other social networks.

One crucial question to ask yourself whenever you set a social media goal is, “How will this help me achieve my business objectives?”

2. Establish your KPIs and measure Media ROI

Once you’ve got your goals, you need to establish your key performance indicators (KPIs), i.e., the metrics that you will need to monitor and measure to accurately measure your social media goals.

If a goal is unmeasurable, you should come up with substitute objectives.

For instance, you would need to track both your clickthrough rate and social media traffic if your objective was to increase your social media traffic.

If you wanted to generate more leads, then you’d need to measure your social media website conversions.

Look at your increase in followers and engagement if you want more people to know about your brand.

Your objectives, whatever they may be, must be measurable, and you must be aware of the metrics to watch in order to do so.

• Traffic
• Reach and engagement
• Leads and conversions

3. Start tracking your metrics

It is time to start tracking your metrics now that you are aware of your goals and the metrics you need to watch.

Google Analytics is a totally free tool that is among the most helpful ones you can use to monitor your social media success.

For traffic tracking, to name one clear-cut reason,.

However, it is also very useful for monitoring your actual conversions, or, to put it another way, the actions that your website’s social media traffic takes.

How to monitor the conversions you make

To get started, go to Admin and select Goals:

 

This is where you set conversion goals (you can set up to 20 goals, so adjust them as necessary) to monitor the actions that your social media accounts are generating on your website, such as subscribing to your newsletter, making a purchase, scheduling an appointment with your company, and so forth.

In addition, you have the option to assign a monetary value to each goal. This will simplify the tracking of your social media return on investment, as Google Analytics will automatically compile the total value of all conversions resulting from your traffic.

When you click on Goals, you will see a variety of goal templates to select from when it comes to setting up conversion goals.

 

You can create your own custom goal too, but it might not be needed as they cover most common website actions; for example, making a reservation or a payment, requesting to become an affiliate, submitting a form, or viewing a piece of content, among many others.

You then have the option to set 4 different types of goals:

• Specific link/destination
• Duration and time spent on a certain page
• Number of pages visited per session
• Taking a certain action

Lastly, as I previously indicated, you have the option to assign monetary values to each of your conversion objectives. For example, if for every 10 people who sign up to your list, one of them will buy from you something worth £1,000, then that goal’s value would be around £100.

Google Analytics will automatically track these results, allowing you to track your ROI in terms of the number of conversions made, each time you monitor your website traffic—in this case, social media traffic.

Create a data-driven marketing strategy

Digital marketing is hard, and measuring social media ROI is no different. That’s why we recommend scheduling a free 1-2-1 consultation call to discuss your marketing strategy with an expert. During your dedicated consultation, you’ll identify challenges and opportunities for your business to grow through digital marketing, as well as our recommended next steps.

5. What you should know about tracking your clicks on social media and media return on investment

When you check your social media analytics (for example, Facebook Insights), you can also see how many clicks each post got.

Though clicks do not always tell you a lot about your social media traffic, that is still relevant information. You can tell which posts received the most clicks, but you have no idea how long visitors stayed on your site or what they did. Furthermore, it becomes more challenging to comprehend how each social network functions independently using this approach.

You can track your traffic more accurately and identify its source by adding UTM parameters—small pieces of code that are attached to your social media links—to them. This is one easy way to deal with the problem.

You can easily generate a link with UTM parameters by using the Google Analytics campaign builder:

 

 

Simply follow the instructions and enter the information required to have it generated.

Another option is to use something like Agorapulse, which is built for social media use; it’s a social media management tool with publishing and scheduling features, including adding UTM parameters to any of the links you share.

 

You can create a custom UTM parameter as per your needs, but there are already 3 common parameters to choose from.

Take advantage of the data that comes from your links to learn more about your social media presence and the sources of your traffic.

Conclusion

To assess the impact of your social media presence, you need to go beyond simply examining your social media analytics and a little Google Analytics. You need to go through certain steps. To extract more information from your analytics and accurately assess your performance, follow these steps:

• Determine your goals for social media: Prioritize your goals and be clear about them.
• Establish your objective KPIs: for each objective you’ve set, make a list of the KPIs you’ll need to track to measure the objective
• Start tracking!

Utilize your analytics to determine whether your investment is yielding the desired results as well as what adjustments are necessary to maximize the impact of your social media presence. Find out more and book your call today.