Tracking your social media marketing
Tracking your result is always important in any marketing approach. To those with skepticism about the effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool, tracking the results can be a jaw dropper. One of the advantages to adding social media to your marketing is the ability to track clicks on the internet. On the internet we can record all of the clicks, visits, and downloads from our site.
In any marketing campaign you need to justify the money spent by providing a track record of success. You need an ROI (return on investment) for the money and effort involved. In the realm of social media this can get a little bit tricky unless you are tracking everything before, during, and after your campaign.
They key to successful discovery of your social media campaign ROI is setting defined objectives. For instance I might decide that I want to measure the effect 1,000 more twitter followers, 100 more facebook friends, and 50 more connections on LinkedIn on my business. I would then set out to accomplish that goal, but I would need to know some other data before I started to measure its effectiveness. Some of the background questions might include: “How many sales did I make in the target month last year, and the year before?” “What other marketing am I currently using at the same time, and how effective has it been historically?” One great way to measure social media is to combine it with a traditionally successful marketing approach that you have already used. Measure the difference in results after the injection of social media into the approach.
The other thing that really must be done is to setup analytics. There are many services and web applications out there built specifically for tracking your website visitors and giving you a better understanding of what happens when people visit your website. Of all the paid and free software available Google Analytics is by far my personal favorite. For free software, it has a lot of powerful features that can help you understand whats going on in your website.
Using Google Analytics is relatively simple. You start out on a dashboard screen that gives you a line graph of the recent site activity. You can graph by day, week, or month. At first you get some simple information such as site visits, pageviews, pages per visit, and so on. When you explore the menu on the left you discover just how great the software really is. For instance under Content you can select “site overlay” and this brings up your website with the clicks overlaid on top. This can help you develop a logical process to understand what people are clicking on, and possibly the train of thought associated with a visit to the site.
Another great feature is the map overlay. With this tool you can see your visitors on a map, and calculate the number of visitors that came from specific countries, states, and cities. You can also break down the visitors browser, and by a host of other filtering options. Having visual tools to track your progress can be very helpful.
Getting local with your tracking can also be a big help. If you choose a specific locality as a market to test your social media campaign and combine it with traditional marketing you can track your website results using analytics and see them on a map.
Get Goals Setup!
The cornerstone of tracking results is having results goals setup. If you do not know what pages of your website should be goals you need to rethink your strategy for a minute. Every website should contain goals that visitors are meant to help you accomplish. For instance a pizza company might have online coupons, they would be a goal when someone looked at them, they might have a viral marketing piece on facebook, the page the advertisement links back to would be a goal, and of course anytime the checkout screen is reached to sell a pizza online would be another goal. If you are trying to develop more connections through social media, a social media page might be in order, and when someone visited the page a goal would be achieved. You can estimate the effectiveness of your page by looking at the number of new friends/followers/connections it has developed for you. Google also has a goal tracking mechanism in its analytics application. Setting up Google Analytics is fairly easy to do, but it does require some code to be copied and pasted into the bottom of your pages. If you think you will mess this step up, I would recommend asking a professional to do it for you… it should not cost much, as its not a very hard thing to do!
Much of social media is viral in nature, and its often true that successful social media marketing will snow ball and bring more success. It is for this reason we must always develop solid goals, and track those goals with real numbers. We should be asking ourselfs questions like, “How many new facebook connections = 1 new sale? Based on what I know about facebook how many new quality connections can I make in a month?”
It is important to know that unless you track your progress, and can establish the real world results of your social media, you are probably wasting your time!
PS: check out Jen’s blog post about social media and traditional marketing
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Aaron Mills is a Project Manager for Jailbreak Creative. He has many years of experience working in the web industry and regularly works with local and national clients on a variety of web projects.
Aaron has extensive experience working in both PHP and Ruby on Rails Projects. Aaron also does work with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and web marketing. 
A lot of times the “real world results” are just in new relationships built. If my efforts turn into dollars, I know what my progress has been. I think it can be that simple.
But when you need to turn those relationships into data for the board room you can turn them into numbers. At that point you can get a measurement of your investment in time in comparison to your return in dollars. You also then have an equation for future success.
Example 5 new meetings/calls/emails a week = 1 new sale/contract/opportunity.
You can even drill that number down into hours spent using social media and test different mixes of mediums to compare results.
This can also convert for larger social media operations that are not personal but mechanical in nature. This could include social media advertising and social media contest on a scale to reach thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Tracking any marketing campaign is important in regards to the effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool, Social Media is changing the way people market.
In my opinion, tracking any marketing campaign is important so that you can be sure that what you are doing is working…so that you can keep on doing that! By combining Social Media and Google Analytics, tracking and marketing just got that much more simple.
Great article! I am bookmarking ya!
This blog is very useful one and it conveys the social media marketing with internet advantages. I like this new blog so much.
Social Media Marketing is a powerful internet marketing strategy and it is direct, transparent and only targets your desired audience. I completely agree with the view that Google Analytic is great software because of its simplicity.