Doing social media marketing alone is very hard. And things gets even more complicated when you try to measure it’s impact on our business. Knowing the number of likes, shares and comments are not enough, you need to go beyond that.
In this post you will learn some of the most advanced techniques to analyze your social media marketing efforts.
1. Standard Metrics-
Conversation Rate –
Conversation Rate is the ratio of comments per post to overall followers. It tells you whether or not you are having a meaningful conversation with your followers.
Amplification Rate –
Amplification rate is the ratio of shares per post to overall Followers. It helps you measure which posts are more relevant or not to your followers. Nobody wants to share posts that suck.
Applause Rate –
Applause rate is the ratio of Likes per post to overall Followers. It tells you if your post even a little bit helpful to your followers that they cared to like it or not.
Economic Value –
Economic value helps you measure the outcome of all your social media efforts. It’s the sum of short and long term revenue as well as cost savings.
You can use the True Social metrics to measure all these metrics automatically or click below to do it manually.
2. Brand Exposure –
This report helps you measure how many new customers visited your website because of your Branded Campaigns.
The purpose of measuring it is to understand how many new customers visited your website because of your Branding Campaigns. If you look at the above report, you can see that there is a 10 % percent decrease in new visitors, Which means that the social media campaigns during Oct are performing worse than the previous period. The returning visitors number is also dropped by nearly the same amount. So the company is neither attracting new customers and neither able to delight their current customers. So whatever they are doing, it is just not working.
To do the above analysis, you need to keep few things in mind –
1. First, You need to measure the number of new visitors before the campaign, in our case Sep 2017 and during the campaign in Oct 2017 to measure the Percentage change in new visitors to your website, Which you can easily do in Google Analytics by using the compare date range function at the top of the report, you don’t have to do it manually. you can find this report in Google Analytics under – Audience > Behavior > New vs Returning
2. Second, you have to remove the All user segments at the top of the report and apply the Campaign segment you wish to measure, in our case organic social media traffic. Here is how the social media segment will look like.
Click the link to download this Social media segment in your Google Analytics. After downloading it, change the source name based on your Google Analytics report. You can find Which social media channels sending traffic to your website in GA under Acquisition > Channel > Social. Just include the high volume traffic channels, you don’t have to include the channels that are sending very few visitors.
3. Likelihood To Recommend –
It’s obvious, it helps you measure the overall experience of your customers.It helps you understand if customers find your website or offerings helpful enough that they recommend it to their friends and family.
You can measure the Likelihood to recommend by simply using any on-exit survey tools like Google website Survey, Hotjar , or Qualaroo.
4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) –
Customer Lifetime value helps you to understand, which channels, campaigns, etc. are adding more long-term value to your business and which are not.
In Google Analytics, you can easily find this. Just Go to Audience > Lifetime Value.
The above data shows that Social media is one of the worst-performing channel for Google’s merchandise store. It suck, it’s just not working. And affiliates is even worse than this.
5. Visitors Loyalty and Recency –
Visitors Loyalty (Frequency) –
From the above data, we can see that Google Merchandise store’s customers aren’t too loyal. During this time period, out of 85,000 users, 80,000 visited the website only once and never again. Totally pathetic. What Google store or you want is greater distribution at the bottom of this report. Having more people at the bottom means you are doing very good.
As at this moment we are only interested in measuring the visitors loyalty of our social media, we have filter this report by the social media segment that we discussed before or click here to get it.
The social media traffic is also performing very poor. About 90% of the traffic came to the website only once. You can also apply additional segments to this report to get more insights.
Visitors Recency –
Visitor Recency tells you how long it has been since a visitor last visited your website or what is the gap between two visits from the same person to your website.
From the above data, we can see that 70% of the Returning visitors, visited the website in less than 7 days, which is great. You want your customers to visit your website as much as possible. Here you want more users at the top of this distribution, having more users at the bottom means you are not performing very well.
Let’s only look at the social media traffic –
The recency of the social media traffic is also very good.
If you look closely on the above picture, you can see that I have made a slight change in the social media visitor segment at the top of the report, it containing only the returning social media visitors and also in the first picture. By default, the recency report includes all visit, that means the new visits ( people who have never been to your site) also get added to the “0 Days ago” bucket. And to get the correct calculation, we need to remove the new visits from this report as we did in the first. That’s why we also made changes to our social media segment to reflect the same thing.
Click the link to download this Returning social media visitors segment. Use this segment in the recency report or anywhere where you need to include only returning social media visitors, otherwise, use the one you have downloaded above in the post or click the link to download it- Ak – All social media segment.
Conclusion – Although the gap between two visits(Recency) is good for GMS, there is a huge problem with visitor loyalty for all traffic sources as well as the social media source. They needs to resolve this problem. You not only want the Gap between two visits to be shorter but you also want frequency ( number of times someone visited your website) to be higher.
6. Task Completion Rate –
Your customers doesn’t come everyday to purchase from you. Some day they come to buy from you and some day for only price comparison or may be they just want to check their order status. So there are lots of things that is happening on your website and you want to do all those things well. Task completion rate exactly helps you do that, it helps you understand what is working on your website and what is not. It also helps you understand the primary purpose of your customers apart from just buying things.
All you need to do is just ask these three questions –
1. What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
2. Were you able to complete your task today?
3. If you were not able to complete your task today, Why not?
That’s it. It’s very simple thing to do but gives you lots of amazing insights about your customer’s behavior.
7. Assisted Conversion –
Assisted conversion helps you measure the real impact of a channel to your business. By Default, Google analytics gives the credit for a sale or conversion to the channel that is involved in closing the sale. But in reality, this is not the case. Customers interact with you multiple times via multiple channels before making a purchase. Assisted conversion helps you measure additional value that is added by every channel to you business.
In the above report, you can see that social media not only helped Google store to generate $749 in revenue but it also added additional $5431 in revenue to the google merchandise store.
The last column in the report helps you understand if a channel helped more in assisting sales or closing sales. The higher value indicated it helps more in assisting than closing and lower value indicates the channel mostly helps in closing the sale and a value equal to 1 means the channel is helping in both assisting and closing the sale equally. Look for the channels which have the highest values in this column, they are the underdogs. Show some love to them.
8. Economic Value –
Previously we saw this metric but that was a very narrow view of it. Here, we will go much deeper than that. It is one the most important metric that you really need to understand very well.
It forces you to not only focus on Macro conversions(products sales and subscriptions) but also on Micro conversions(sign-up for email newsletter or writing reviews on your website). You only get the complete picture of your business When you measure both the macro and micro conversion. Measuring just the macro conversion is not enough because very tiny fraction (2-3%) of your website visitors is going to convert.
The custom social media report in Google Analytics(can be downloaded below).
The Per Session goal value gives you the Economic Value(Macro+Micro goals). Here the per session value for all the sources are $0 because the person manages this GA account didn’t created the goals for this account.
Why Economic value is so important?
I hope this makes it clear why do you need measure it. Most people only measure the metrics from the first or second bucket but not from the third one. But this is exactly what you need to do if you want to be successful.
Custom social media report – LWD – Social media Macro+Micro performance analysis.
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