How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

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How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

1 http://pivotcon.com/the-state-of-social-marketing-2012-2013/ and http://pivotcon.com/research_reports/SOS2013.pdf 2 http://sloanreview.mit.edu/reports/shifting-social-biz-1/3 Gartner: Predicts 2013 Social and Collaboration Go Deeper and Wider, November 28, 2012 as cited in the previous MIT report

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

Companies spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours creating presences on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

Management teams ask: “Is this time and money well-spent?”

The only way to tell is to measure how marketing impacts brand building, customer awareness of products and services, lead generation, customer acquisition (or sales) and other important business metrics.

How to do so? The early days of social media marketing talked about “Return on Interest” or “Return on Interaction.” In many cases, those were valid ways of looking at new communications efforts. Companies made some of their earliest efforts at one-to-one or one-to-few communications and changing the model for customer communications.

Today, we still see the power of social media in helping companies connect with customers. A recent study by the Pivot Conference states that 67 percent of marketers surveyed felt “Customer Engagement” and “Brand Lift” were their leading goals for using social media. 58 percent want to increase sales, and 55 percent want to improve lead generation.1

What’s holding social media back in organizations? According to Pivot, executive skepticism and lack of metrics jumped from fifth and sixth position (in 2011) respectively to third and fourth. Marketers feel they’re getting results from social media, but the statistics to convince executives aren’t easy to create.

The way marketers look at social media metrics has changed over time. eMarketer cites a CMO survey commissioned by the AMA in February 2013, which shows that hits and visits are down as a measure of importance. Meanwhile, friends, followers and web mentions are all still valued, which indicates that marketers are thinking about social media as a long-term branding and loyalty effort.

Companies should value brand building and customer awareness metrics as well as sales and marketing numbers. “With social, we are passing the peak of faddishness. Companies are starting to crack social’s code and turning to it for business advantage, intelligence and insight,” said Gerald Kane, professor at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.2

According to the MIT Sloan School of Business study, three key factors hold businesses back: “lack of an overall strategy

(28 percent of respondents), too many competing priorities (26 percent), and lack of a proven business case or strong value proposition (21 percent) […] Gartner estimates that 80 percent of social business projects between now and 2015 will yield disappointing results because of a lack of leadership support and a narrow view of social as a technology rather than a business driver.”3

This paper will help you prove the business case for social media. Discover available social media metrics, and learn how to tie interactions back to internal systems, processes and key performance indicators (KPIs) so your organization can judge your social media marketing on its own merits.

Social Media Metrics Used by US Marketers,Aug 2010 & Feb 2013% of respondents

Aug 2010 Feb 2013Hits/visits/page views 47.6% 40.9%Number of followers or friends 24.0% 30.5%Repeat visits 34.7% 24.9%Conversion rates (from visitor to buyer) 25.4% 21.1%Buzz indicators (web mentions) 15.7% 16.2%Customer acquisition costs 11.8% 10.2%Net promoter score 7.5% 9.8%Revenues per customer 17.2% 9.2%Sales levels 17.9% 8.7%Other text analysis ratings 6.6% 8.5%Online product/service ratings 8.2% 6.0%Profits per customer 9.4% 4.5%Customer retention costs 7.7% 3.0%Abandoned shopping carts 3.8% 2.8%Source: Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, “The CMO Survey“ commissioned by the American Marketing Association (AMA), Feb 26, 2013152764 www.eMarketer.com

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

Tying Social Media to Sales

Companies are investing time and money on social

media, trying to connect with customers, help them raise

awareness about products and services, and make more

sales. How can they tell if their efforts are working? In a

phrase: they have to measure.

Most businesses of a certain size or age have a system in

place to track customers, leads and sales. They understand

their own customer acquisition funnel. Most also have a

web presence where they’re able to measure traffic, and in

the case of e-commerce, directly measure their sales online.

Social media is another animal. Companies don’t own the

sites where their social presences live. They may

have a page on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+,

or a Twitter account, but the companies

that own those sites have control of the

data on customer interactions. Marketers

can get some statistics, and can track

referrers so they know which social

networks are sending them traffic, but

the overall measurement picture is a

mess. Excel and manual counting are

often the lowest common denominator for

gathering statistics.

Additionally, we’re not just reaching customers and

prospects in one or two channels – it is a multi-channel

world. Content on your own site may go out in an email,

appear in a social network and be shared in an online

community or quoted in a blog.

According to Brendon O’Donovan, product marketing

manager at Vocus, “Thinking about a campaign for a

conference or an event, companies are taking a cross-

channel approach for marketing activity. They may have

a press release, a blog post, tweet about it and create a

Facebook promotion, but it all ties back into the same

campaign. What channels are you using most? Which ones

are getting the most click-throughs? Which ones are giving

you the most sign-ups for a form?”

On Facebook, we can track how many people like something,

or how many times it’s shared with others. Twitter is less

trackable, according to O’Donovan. We can see who

retweeted, who replied, and using link-tracking services

like Bitly, you can tell who’s clicking on content and how

often. By creating landing pages for campaigns, you can

see who completed a form or created a lead, and get more

information than the social networks themselves provide.

However, to measure this way, the customer must leave the

network to interact with your website directly.

This is a difficult problem. The data we require

comes from multiple sources, and we need to

integrate it, compare it and then connect it to

our business systems to see what effect the

posts, tweets, shares and clicks are having on

our business.

Tying social media analytics to business results

In short, we can tie the metrics from social media to

business results. But it’s not a slam-dunk, and we often need

an incomplete off-the-shelf solution to do the tracking and

connections. So where do we start?

Marshall Sponder, CEO of Web Metrics Guru, Inc. and author

of “Social Media Analytics,” talked about the customer

journey. “How does someone find your restaurant, or gas

station, or copy center? Businesses should understand

how push and pull advertising and marketing contribute

to that customer’s journey.” The journey will dictate the

means of tracking results, and the metrics will derive from

the different points in the journey to help you evaluate the

process of moving people through your funnel. That way,

you can look at those points and see if the money and time

spent on social media is actually working.

If you’re not already aware of the KPIs that help bring

customers into your own funnel, tracking social media

statistics won’t yield new insights. Customers may go

through a simple model like AIDA – Awareness, Interest,

Desire and Action.

Whatever model you use, it’s important to understand what

makes customers think they need a business like yours

in order to find it, express an interest in your product or

service and finally make a purchase. Once you’re clear on

that concept, you can map people’s likes, follows, tweets or

interactions to actual business results.

Branding versus sales

Social media can be helpful at any point in the sales funnel.

Whether your goal is increasing audience or nurturing

customers post-sale, social has its uses. Sometimes, we put

#1

42%

13%

35%

10%

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

a quantitative value on a qualitative relationship – trying

to determine if interaction actually means interest, and if

interest implies intent.

Christopher Penn, vice president of marketing technologies

at SHIFT Communications, notes that it’s useful to start at

the bottom of the marketing funnel – with a sale. “You have

to be able to place a monetary or quantitative value on the

end result. For a ‘standard’ B2B company, your funnel is

Sales, Opportunities, Leads, Prospects and your Audience.

“If you map out the funnel well, you should be able to set

values per stage of the funnel, in reverse. If the value of a

Sale is $1,000 and you have a 10 percent conversion rate

up and down the funnel, then an Opportunity is valued at

$100, a Lead at $10, a Prospect at $1 and a member of your

Audience at $0.10. [For argument’s sake], you can plug these

into the analytics application of your choice and more

importantly, you’ll be able to assess at each given stage what

things are worth what values. In any reasonably good web

analytics package, you can plug those values in and know

what’s delivering the actual value that drives the sale.”

If a sale isn’t your goal, and you’re trying to increase

awareness or build brand, you can look at this differently.

“Think of all the people in your addressable audience – fans,

followers, circles. A ‘like’ on Facebook isn’t the end goal,

but you’re trying to figure out the size of the audience

‘bucket’,” says Penn. Tracking those stats for likes,

followers and so on allows you to find what

works to increase that addressable audience,

so they can then get ads, offers or simply

communicate with you.

It’s equally important to track changes going

in the opposite direction, which indicate that

people are hiding your posts, unsubscribing or

unfollowing you. This means that your content is out

of alignment and you should adjust quickly, because those

“hides” actually count in Facebook’s algorithm and may

prevent your content from being seen.4

Building an audience is the first step, says Justin Cutroni,

Google’s analytics evangelist. “When it comes to people

taking some sort of social action and then correlating that

with sales, we like to tie the two together. Most businesses

are there now, where they’re continuously building an

audience. We measure that in audience size and interaction.

“Are people following me, and when I post are they

interacting? But the idea is to ultimately drive whatever

your business objective is. Commerce being the simplest

example, I might look to my social network as a channel

that generates sales, so I would put a promotion out to that

group: ‘Thanks for following or circling – here’s an offer.’

Those kinds of things are very trackable.”

Case Study: Castle Auto GroupAn example of a company

that uses (paid) social me-

dia is Castle Auto Group

(also documented in our

guide, “A Marketer’s Guide

to the New Facebook5”.)

Castle used Facebook’s

“Custom Audiences” toolset

to increase audience and track their actions di-

rectly. First, they uploaded their existing email list,

and Facebook matched as many of the addresses as

possible to existing users. Then they targeted ads

to that group, increasing the number of “likes” their

page had, which increased their audience.

As they developed a larger audience to address,

they were able to spend $300 targeting a Facebook

“Offer”6 for an oil change deal. This specific cam-

paign translated into $12,000 worth of business di-

rectly attributable to their Facebook promotion.

From a metrics perspective, Castle tracked the

number of “likes” on their page using Facebook In-

sights to see their audience grow. They could see

the number of times their fans interacted with their

page and how many times initiatives like their Face-

book “Offer” were shared. Additionally, Castle said

their company watches to see which posts have the

most interactions for “People Talking About This,”

which includes everything from “likes”, shares and

comments to people who answer questions, re-

spond to events or claim offers. Castle is a good ex-

ample of growing an audience and learning how

specific promotions generate revenue.

4 http://www.christopherspenn.com/2013/08/in-case-you-missed-it-the-facebook-algorithm/

5 http://www.vocus.com/blog/facebook-marketing-guide/

6 https://www.facebook.com/help/pages/offers

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

Understanding Metrics 101

What are you trying to measure?

According to Marshall Sponder, “You can only measure

what you’re in control of. Success, in terms of metrics, is

dictated by your ability to control points of measurement

and get people in your organization to agree on basic

measurements and how to pull them.” But the challenge is,

in social media, you’re not in control of the platform. You

can track how many people “like” your page or “follow”

your account, but you’re at the mercy of what the platform

vendors provide as far as statistics and insights.

And changes in metrics levels don’t always correspond to

exact changes in leads, sales and the like. So, we need to test

how changes in social media metrics actually impact our

pipeline or funnel.

You may be wondering, “Can’t I just put all of this into

a big dashboard?” Well, it’s not as easy as that. Different

metrics (internal, web, social) come from

different sources, and it’s not always easy to

integrate them. Major corporations spend

millions customizing systems to tie their

sales and company processes to their

marketing data.

However, if you “have more time than

money, you can do a lot of this work

in Excel,” says Christopher Penn. For

example, you can track people when they

come from your web pipeline to your sales

pipeline when they fill out a lead form and see

which of those leads convert. Keep track of which ones

found your site via LinkedIn, which via Twitter and so on.

Pretty soon, you’ll be able to see trends. One company may

have lots more web traffic via Twitter, but more conversions

coming from LinkedIn.

Key metrics for less metrically-minded marketers

Most marketers are familiar with the social metrics for major

networks. According to O’Donovan, “Things like Facebook

“likes”, shares, comments and engagement metrics are

things that show how your content is resonating. Likewise

on Twitter, your follower growth and how many people are

retweeting or sharing your content. LinkedIn is tough to

#2measure or monitor, and it almost comes down to the way

that people engage with you on forums and the way they

make connections by what you post.”

O’Donovan stresses the use of URL shorteners, like Bitly,

which allow you to share specific content and track things

back to your own site. This way, you can see how

many times people clicked on a link, and more

importantly, the origin of the click. This

is useful because you can see what links

resonated on one social network versus

another. You can guide your efforts by

understanding which types of content work

better on LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Pinterest.

If more people interact with your content on

Facebook, but you get more people who sign up for

your newsletter or make a sales inquiry from LinkedIn, you

can start to focus more on the LinkedIn content, improving

it so that you get even more inquiries.

O’Donovan notes that there are some things you can’t see

and measure well but seem to create customer interest.

“We’ve had success with Pinterest, which is surprising for

a B2B software company because when you think about

Pinterest, you may think weddings and recipes. But you

can track repins and shares and landing pages they go

to, and the way our content was being shared was hugely

successful for us.”

By keeping track of the different tactics, posts and topics

you’re sharing, you can see which ones cause an uptick

(or downtick) in any of the metrics you’re already tracking

within your company and start identifying trends. For

networks with limited metrics dashboards, such as Twitter

(for non-promoted items), one way to track effectiveness is

to share content from your own site and track how many

visitors are coming from that site. Otherwise, you’ll invest

time and effort into branding and awareness and have to

blindly trust the results.

Getting Started with Google Analytics

For many entrepreneurial marketers, Google Analytics (or

a similar package) is the primary insights package for the

web. They track simple things like most popular content,

which pages people stay on the longest and what sites are

Name:

Email:

Website:

Message:

#3

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

referring visitors. With a little more sophistication, you can

create funnels that track how users get to your site and what

path they take to convert to a sale or sign up. Google’s Justin

Cutroni explains some really important Google Analytics

functions that will help you generate hard data from your

web and social interactions with customers.

The two essential google analytics elements

There are two main configuration steps for using Google

Analytics once it’s set up on your site: set up goals and use

link tagging.

1: Setting up goals

The most obvious goals to set up are those Cutroni

refers to as “macro-conversions,” like sales

or lead generation forms. “But it’s not

just macro-conversions. Goals can be

visitor actions like downloading a

white paper, viewing a specific piece

of content or watching a video. If

you’ve got analytics implemented

the right way, all of those smaller

visitor actions can be turned into

‘micro-conversions.’”

Setting up goals in analytics is as easy as

defining which paths or pre-determined steps

people take going through your site (a funnel), and where

they end up (a sign-up form page, for example). Look at

the other small little things you’re doing to engage the user

on your site and create goals so you know they’re actually

happening.

“In terms of funnels, every macro-conversion usually has

a defined process the user has to go through, and we set

those up as a funnel, and I usually start it where the actual

process starts.” Funnels are important because if they have

steps, you can see where a user drops out in the process and

fix that sign up form or conversion element. This is most

important with visitor actions that most frequently precede

the macro-conversions.

Google Analytics has a “Visitor Flow” report that is useful to

look at – Cutroni calls it a “flexible funnel” to see users’ paths

through the site. People may enter your site at a different

place or URL than you expect or take a different path to a

goal. The Visitor Flow report can help you find that out.

2: Tagging links

Link tagging means adding extra information to links so

that Google Analytics can pick it up. Say you were running

a campaign on Facebook to get people to sign up for your

email newsletter. Or perhaps you had two different ads

and wanted to see which one converts more effectively. A

standard link back to your website might be http://YourSite.

com/MailSignUp.

A tagged example would be the URL: http: //YourSite.com/

MailSignUp?utm source=Facebook&utm_medium=Facebook

CPC&utm_term=MyCompanyName&utm_ content=Ad1&utm

campaign=MailSignUp

In this URL, the “source” is the network name – in this

case, Facebook. It could also be a search engine or another

place the campaign is running. The “medium” represents

Facebook’s cost-per-click (CPC) ads. The “term” is the

keyword for the campaign – so this ad would be one you set

up to target people searching for your company name. “Ad1”

means this is version 1 of your ad, assuming you’re running

several different ads as a test. And finally, the “campaign”

is “MailSignUp” – so you can track how many people are

actually doing that. As a marketer, you don’t have to know

how to create these links manually, as there’s a page on

Google that does it for you.7

If you’ve done the work to tag your ads, then you can

go into Google Analytics, click “Traffic Sources,”

then “Advertising,” then “Campaigns,” and see

the following chart by also clicking on “Ad

Group” (see arrow). In this case, for one sign-

up campaign, ads 1 and 2 outperform ads 3 and

4 for getting visits, but more people completed

the goal of signing up when they saw ad 2.

7 URL Builder = https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

Cutroni also offers a spreadsheet that will let you create

these URLs in bulk.8

With custom URLs, you can see more information about

where the URL was clicked (Twitter vs. an email, for

example), and if you’re testing different pictures or campaign

language, you can see which test brought in more clicks.

Tagged links can be very useful in helping see what sources

(in social media, or elsewhere) are sending people to your

funnel and how well those sources are working.

What things can your company do to customize the experience?

Track your audience growth and the traffic you get from

your social media sites and other locations on the web.

Google Analytics allows you to customize your dashboard

to show the specific metrics and modules you want to see

when you log in to create custom reports.

In fact, Cutroni shares a link to the Solutions Gallery where

you can add your own social media dashboard.9 Click the

link when you’re logged into Analytics, and it will add

the pre-built “Social Media Dashboard,” an “e-commerce

Dashboard” or any of several other dashboards that report to

your company’s analytics view. If none of those Dashboards

are for you, try one of the many third-party plugins,10 or

start making your own, no programming required. (Picture

from: http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/04/24/a-social-media-

dashboard-for-google-analytics/11)

Case Study: Fairmont Hotels12

Fairmont Hotels and Re-

sorts had been using

Twitter to increase aware-

ness and drive traffic to

their website. However,

Twitter can come from

sources other than Twitter.

com – such as mobile apps,

emails and SMS messages – and Fair-

mont couldn’t track these sources effectively.

They now tag their links using the Google link-tag-

ging tool mentioned previously.13 They take the

longer links and use a URL shortener to keep the

tweets manageable (fewer than 140 characters).

The marketing and analytics manager tracks the

traffic by looking at each specific traffic channel,

then at the campaign. This allows her to see the dif-

ferent tweets and how they perform. They’re able

to track bounce rate, new visitors and conversions.

The team also created goals and is now able to

see which subjects resonate with visitors and how

tweets contribute to revenue and booking goals. By

doing additional segment analysis, they are able to

see which properties get booked via Twitter.

This simple example shows the power of tracking

links effectively and how links can be used within

an analytics package like Google Analytics to learn

more about customers and their journey towards

your product or service.

8 http://www.google.com/analytics/apps/results?category=Campaign%20Management

9 http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/solutions-gallery.html

10 http://www.google.com/analytics/apps/results?q=analytics&start=0

11 Picture from: http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/04/24/a-social-media-dashboard-for-google-analytics/

12 http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/analytics/case_studies/case_study_fairmonthotels_en-US.pdf

13 URL Builder = https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

Specific Metrics and Specific Actions

Ways to understand which actions cause what outcomes

Attribution modeling can help you understand exactly what

actions in different networks affect your customer’s be-

havior. Try to assign different values to different customer

“touches” along the chain while trying to determine what

steps lead to conversion. You may give a certain amount of

weight to a customer signing up for a newsletter, another

amount to a Facebook link that brought them to your site

and perhaps some value to a Google ad.

Attribution modeling

Attribution modeling allows you to experiment and see

which interaction points lead to behaviors like conversions

and sales. It is one of the most powerful features in Google

Analytics. Cutroni notes that “Multi-Channel Funnels” are a

great introduction into attribution modeling. Multi-Channel

Funnels let you see the role that prior site referrals, searches

and ads play in bringing a visitor towards conversion. They

also let you see how much time has passed between the first

interaction and a purchase or another decision.14

Funnels help you identify all the different marketing chan-

nels you’re using and what Cutroni calls “Exposers and Clos-

ers.” An exposer is more upper-funnel and generates

a lot of traffic, but not a lot of conversions. For

example, exposers may see a YouTube video

with your product or service and that may

bring them to your website, but they may

not buy at that moment. A closer is more

bottom of the funnel, generating conver-

sions and revenue, such as a coupon. So-

cial can be an exposer or a closer depending

on how it is used.

Tweeting “Check out our new offerings” vs. “20% off when

you click now” can have different results. Create the custom

URLs so you can track how those activities come through.

#4 You can customize a channel in GA; for example, “Came

from Social with a custom URL value of X.”

Then, you can see if these activities are achieving their goals

with attribution modeling.15 With attribution modeling, you

can understand the return you get from each channel. The

function lets you assign different values to different aspects

of your multi-channel funnel and then experiment with

weighting the values.

Cutroni talked about a model that gives all the credit to the

last click in a channel. This model cannot account for the

other interactions someone may have had with your site,

your email campaign or your social presences. A

time decay model (where several clicks clos-

est in time to the sale or conversion get the

credit) might be more appropriate, but

you won’t know it until you test it.

“When you’re getting into attribution

modeling, start with a basic model.

For most businesses in e-commerce,

a decay model is a good one to use.

Compare a decay model with the last

click model (you can have columns in the

report) to see metrics and look for places where

the models show very different values for the channel. “

For a last click model, you may see social having a low val-

ue, but in a decay model, a very high value. That tells you

the channel may not be good at closing, but it does expose

people to your offering. We’re trying to monetize the funnel

and see how much each item is worth. Then, the whole idea

is you need to change something. Identify a place where

there may be more value, like in social, and change some-

thing. Try investing more time or money there to see if you

get more conversions.”

Attribution modeling works only when you vary the condi-

tions and see where the value occurs.

Tracking actions on social networks back to your store

14 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1191180?hl=en

15 http://www.google.com/analytics/features/attribution.html

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

We’ve seen how social network actions can track back to

things that happen on our websites using tracking links,

shortened URLs, offers or coupons and the like. But how

can we tell if what we’re doing online influences in-store

behavior?

Research shows that networks like Facebook and Pinterest

are influencing consumer behavior in larger stores. Ac-

cording to a report in the Harvard Business Review, “Pinter-

est is an especially popular driver of in-store sales: 21 per-

cent of the Pinterest users we surveyed said that

they bought an item in-store after pinning,

repinning, or ‘liking’ it, and 36 percent

of users under 35 said they had done

so.”16 Further data from a more full

study by the same authors17 notes

that Facebook is most likely driv-

ing customers to purchase – one

in three Facebook users has pur-

chased something after sharing,

liking or commenting. Overall, 40

percent of social media users have pur-

chased an item after sharing or favoriting it

on a network like Twitter, Pinterest or Facebook.

In August 2013, Twitter announced a partnership with Dat-

aLogix to measure the offline sales impact of promoted and

organic Tweets sent by consumer packaged goods compa-

nies.18 The report notes, “Users who engaged with a brand’s

Promoted Tweets purchased more from that brand than a

statistically identical control group, resulting in a 12 percent

average sales lift.”

There are ways to track online actions to in-store purchas-

ing. None are guaranteed, but here are a few suggestions.

Track views on items in your online catalog to see if viewed

items are not purchased online but are moving in signifi-

cantly greater volume in-store. Offer online site viewers a

way to “print a shopping list” to take in-store with a tracking

or coupon code. The previous example of Castle Automo-

tive’s use of Facebook Offers to drive in-store traffic is an

excellent example of a creative way to track purchases.

Finally, by using loyalty cards or having customers sign up

for an email list, you can tie their online identity to in-store

activity. This might require some initial manual work, but

could yield valuable results.

What are some things that can be easily im-plemented and done in a short timeframe with reasonable effort?

For companies who have not yet done so, one of the most

valuable quick and easy things to implement would be Goo-

gle link tracking. After setting up Google Analytics, start us-

ing the program to track the custom links you’ve created.

This should immediately help track content performance

on different networks with an even finer grain.

For those businesses that are already tracking, take the time

to create or modify your funnels or attribution models. Make

and test different assumptions and see how the results af-

fect your KPIs. While this requires more effort and research,

it can truly start to impact your bottom line pretty quickly.

Unique Metrics by Social Network

Challenge: What are the key metrics for the big social networks?

Facebook

Insights, Facebook’s metrics tool that shows the per-post

metric of how many people were reached, includes level

of engagement they had with your post (likes, clicks, com-

ments and shares). Per-page metrics include engagement

over time, as well as people who leave your page, hide your

posts and other negative metrics. A tab for “When Your Fans

Are Online” may help tune your content and publishing

schedule to the habits of your customers.

Marketers should be aware that Facebook’s capabilities often

change. Facebook’s most recent public guide about Page

Insights19 is from 2012, but the company updated the tool in

#5

16 Sevitt, David and Samuel, Alexandra, “How Pinterest Puts People In Stores,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 2013 http://hbr.org/2013/07/how-pinterest- puts-people-in-stores (subscription required)

17 http://www.visioncritical.com/news/social-networks-send-buyers-brick-and-mortar-stores-data-reveals

18 https://blog.twitter.com/2013/promoted-tweets-drive-offline-sales-for-cpg-brands

19 http://fbrep.com//SMB/Page_Insights_Guide.pdf

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

June 2013.20 Some elements of “People Talking About This”

were split up to be “reported separately as Page Likes, Peo-

ple Engaged (the number of unique people who have liked,

shared or commented on your posts), Page tags and men-

tions, Page check-ins and other interactions on a Page.”21

The company also changed their “virality” measurement to

“engagement rate,” which includes clicks and gives a better

sense of the quality of a post.

If you’re using Facebook to create ads to target potential

customers, the ads manager will help you understand

performance metrics. Facebook’s new business

portal22 does a great job of explaining how to

create ads and measure them. If you have an

e-commerce site, consider adding a Face-

book conversion-tracking pixel code to

your site. Their guide23 tells you how to add

the code to your site and how you can track

your ads and measure conversions.

Twitter

Twitter allows metrics when you’re using their ad system.

If you’re just tweeting from their page or another app,

you’ll need to monitor your following and track tweets and

retweets via that app, or manually in a spreadsheet.

When looking at your engagement, track the growth of

your following as well as the quantity and quality of your

interactions. Start creating Twitter lists of people with

whom you seem to be having good interactions. Cultivate

good relationships with those followers and see if engaging

them increases your overall outcomes – are they signing

up for your newsletter, coming to your website or making

purchases? By using a URL shortener and custom links

from Google Analytics, you can track exactly what content

engages your followers the most.

When looking for customers to engage, Vocus’ system adds

capabilities over standard Twitter searches, notes O’Don-

ovan. “Buying Signals works by monitoring a subsection

of Twitter – tweets with intent, like, ‘I’m looking for a new

bike, any recommendations?’ or ‘Looking for a happy hour

in DC, any suggestions?’ – they have an intent or need for

purchase or advice.”

If you’re using Twitter’s ad system to promote your account

or promote tweets, you get more data. Ads let you target

geographically, demographically, by keyword and to users

who are similar to your existing followers. Twitter promotes

your tweets to customers that it believes will find the tweet

interesting and relevant.

Businesses doing smaller campaigns have access to a

more basic level of analytics.24 Twitter also allows busi-

nesses to promote their account to get more followers.

Organic “Trends” are conversations based on volume of

hashtags or keywords that show up in a specific place on

users’ pages and in Twitter clients. Business can pay to put

a promoted trend on top, but these can be expensive for a

small business.

Google+

Google+ is Google’s social networking layer that allows

for posts, interactions, followers and more. Vocus recently

published an in-depth analysis of marketing on Google+.25

When you share content on Google+, it can be tracked by

seeing how many people shared it and via “ripples,” which

show visually how the content spread on the network. Click

on “View Post Activity” to find these options. When users

click your content in Google+, you can track the results

via your Google Analytics social media console.

Additionally, Google+ has a “+1” button that

is similar to Facebook’s “like” button. Em-

bedding this button on your website helps

give Google signals about people liking

your content. You can also embed a button

that allows users to follow you on the net-

work, thereby increasing your potential audi-

ence for engagement.

As the Vocus report notes, sharing on Google+ not only

benefits your presence there, but also can positively influ-

ence your Google Search results and rankings for fans and

20 https://www.facebook-studio.com/news/item/updating-page-insights

21 Ibid

22 https://www.facebook.com/business/connect

23 https://www.facebook.com/business/roi

24 https://business.twitter.com/products/analytics

25 http://www.vocus.com/blog/google-plus-marketing-guide/

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

their friends. Marketers are just beginning to explore the in-

fluence of Google+ and how it can affect traffic.

In that report, we discussed “Think Geek,” an online retailer of

clothing, gadgets and toys for “smart masses.” “Think Geek’s

page is filled with content, much of it pictures of the things

they sell. These items create an interesting environment for

potential customers, who then discover that Think Geek’s

content is interesting in its own right. For example, more

than 486 people clicked ‘+1’ on their ‘Lego Slippers’ post, 114

people shared the slippers and 25 made comments.”26 Think

Geek can track the conversion rates for items they post and

directly attribute Google+ as part of its sales funnel.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has added better analytics27 to Company Pages as

of July 2013. Companies posting content and updates can

track their reach and engagement with clicks, likes, com-

ments and shares. When you create an update, target

specific audiences and track how posts performed

with different segments of your followers. You

can also receive data on your company’s fol-

lowers, including the places they’re coming

from, demographics and trends (growth or

unfollows) over time.

Companies using sponsored updates and

LinkedIn ads can get even deeper metrics.

Don’t forget to use custom URLs to tie clicks on

the platform back to your own web analytics.

Pinterest

Pinterest has also added analytics, but they’re only avail-

able to verified businesses, so don’t forget to take that step.28

Access your analytics from the upper right corner. You can

see how many people are pinning from your site, repins,

impressions and reach. The dashboard also shows the pins

that are repinned the most, as well as the ones that are

clicked on the most.

Pinterest data can be exported to an Excel-compatible CSV

file, and you can also change the date range to study activity

during specific periods of time. By tracking referrers in Goo-

gle Analytics, you can see the visits you’re getting from Pin-

terest. By using the Google Analytics funnels, you can judge

whether that traffic is converting to sales or other KPIs.

Conclusion

Now that you’re paying attention to your metrics, how can

you make the best use of them with your management team?

Spend some time and research your customer’s journey to

your business, as Marshall Sponder advocates. Communi-

cate with your sales team. Do customer surveys. Are they

truly following the marketing path you expected? If not,

change your assumptions and modify your funnels and

the statistics you’re capturing to match customer reality as

closely as possible.

Metrics can be difficult for people to understand. Utilize the

chart and graph capabilities of Excel, Google Analytics or

your metrics package to track some basic statistics. Try cre-

ating a monthly (or weekly) report that tracks your audience

size on various social networks and show which ones are

providing the best traffic back to your site. Which are “expos-

ers” and which are “closers” like Justin Cutroni mentioned?

Once you’ve got a good idea of the levers you have at your

disposal, report on specific tactical changes you’re making

and what results they generate. Are you creating different

kinds of content? Sometimes this content will resonate and

your followers or fans will increase, and sometimes it won’t.

Be mindful of things that cause people to unfollow your

content. Certain tactics may be novel at first, but may be-

come less interesting with time.

Watch for new statistics and better ways of measuring met-

rics on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

There’s a lot of innovation with capabilities being added on

a constant basis.

Metrics are there to help you learn about customer behav-

ior, test and re-test assumptions, draw conclusions, and im-

prove your recognition, interaction and sales. Data is never

static and is likely seasonal, cyclical or changes as you offer

new products or services. By tracking over time, you’ll be

a more informed marketer or business owner and have a

better chance of success.

26 Vocus Paper on Google + (http://www.vocus.com/blog/google-plus-marketing-guide/)

27 http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4499/kw/company%20page%20analytics

28 http://business.pinterest.com/verify/

How to Track and Measure Social Media Marketing

Special Thanks to

Marshall Sponder, Founder and CEO of Web Metrics Guru,

Inc. and author of Social Media Analytics.

Christopher Penn, Vice President of Marketing Technol-

ogy at SHIFT Communications and blogger at Awaken

Your Superhero.

Justin Cutroni, Analytics Evangelist and Advocate at

Google and author of multiple books on Google Analytics.

About the Author

Howard Greenstein is a marketing technology strategist

and president of the Harbrooke Group, which helps com-

panies communicate with their customers using the latest

Web technologies.

He has worked with clients from the Fortune 500, Cable

Networks and Wall Street, as well as major advocacy groups.

He teaches social media at the Heyman Center for Philan-

thropy and Fundraising at NYU SCPS, and is a regular con-

tributor to Inc.com.

About Vocus

Marketing has evolved. To succeed today, marketers

need to make digital channels work together to generate

brand awareness and demand while tracking and mea-

suring outcomes.

Vocus offers a unique combination of software and ser-

vices to help you succeed. We integrate social, search,

email and PR to deliver real-time marketing opportuni-

ties including leads, prospects, content and media in-

quiries, with integrated analytics that track campaigns

from engagement to conversion.

With our marketing consulting and services team ready

to help, Vocus delivers marketing success.

Find out more at vocus.com

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