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3 ways to track your social media's ROI
Continuous improvements to our marketing tech stacks means we're all getting a little better with our data analytics. However, sometimes you can be left feeling like you've still not got a handle on your marketing attribution.
In a perfect world, we'd all sleep at night knowing exactly how a prospect heard about your company and decided to convert into a paying customer.
But unfortunately, it isn't a perfect world. And with more and more customers being influenced by social selling, realising where your business is coming from has gotten that little bit tricker.
Let's be honest, do you know the ROI of your social accounts?
If the answer is no, you're with the rest of us.
So, here's how CANDDi can help you track your social media ROI and finally deliver the right attribution.
Understand your source
When it comes to marketing attribution, it’s best to go back to basics. So let’s start at the very beginning - your website visitors.
Your website is actually one of your biggest marketing tools, so when a potential customer lands on your website, it shows initial engagement with your brand.
How? Because they’ve shown an active interest in what it is you have to offer, meaning you can cross them off the ‘brand awareness’ list into the official ‘engagement’ stage.
This is exciting of course, but what you really want is to keep them moving through your funnel until they eventually convert.
Now by now we know that it’s very rare for a customer to convert straight away. It takes time to build that relationship and trust, with many customers hitting multiple touchpoints along the way.
The most of these touchpoints will most likely be through your digital marketing and social media platforms.
But how do you know which touchpoints they’re engaging with? CANDDi has the answer.
CANDDi allows you to track your website visitors by source, meaning you’ll be able to see exactly where each prospect comes from whether it be an email campaign, Facebook Ad, Adwords or something on LinkedIn.
From this you can determine which social channels are giving you the highest number of clicks, enabling your marketing team to create more content for those specific platforms to further drive website traffic and ultimately ROI.
Use UTM parameters
UTM parameters are much scarier than they look.
They’re necessary as using your average html link clicks won’t tell you anything. I hate to break it to you, but simply pasting your links into Buffer each week and firing content out across Twitter, Facebook, you name it simply won’t work.
Even if you’re using Google Analytics, its simple referral data won’t display any more than you already know.
Ultimately, you need specifics. Using the source or medium is a good start, but why stop there? Which campaign is this utm for? Better still, which individual piece of content or ad from that campaign?
Once you’ve got them up and running, CANDDi will then allow you to build one of our handy Streams. Streams are essentially filters that run through your website traffic and pull specific visitors depending on parameters and criteria.
With UTM parameters in place, you’ll be able to build a Stream for each social channel to get a better idea of where your ROI is coming from.
Run attribution reports
If we had a pound for everytime we heard “Social media doesn’t drive sales” or “social is only good for brand awareness.” We probably wouldn’t need our social media accounts anymore…
Because it’s simply not true.
What it is, is known as conversion bias. This happens when marketers account only last-touch attribution with conversion and lets this cloud their judgment.
It’s understandable after all, as almost always, the last touchpoint your website visitor lands on gets all the glory.
For example, one of your leads might land on your Twitter page, get directed to a specific landing page, get distracted and then actually convert from an email campaign two-weeks later.
That email will get 100% of the credit with a last-touch attribution model, but we know this doesn’t really make sense. It wasn’t the email that pushed them to convert. In fact, it’s likely that it would have never been a success without all the other stuff leading up to it.
But what if the original social post is what introduced them to your company in the first place? What if it changed their mind on your brand?
By running an attribution report, you can compare attribution models and get a better insight into how your social campaigns are impacting conversions. Or not, in some cases.
You can then delve deeper and start to compare the costs for each campaign, and more importantly, the potential you’re missing out on.
Conclusion
Like most things in marketing, tracking the ROI of your social media platforms can be pretty tough going. But nothing worth having comes easy!
The important thing to remember is to always have a clear goal in mind as this will help you visualise what results you’re looking for with each campaign.
Then be sure to monitor each campaign with the use of UTM codes. This can then be built upon with handy website visitor tracking tools such as CANDDI.
In doing so, you can start to attribute which part of the conversion process your socials are contributing to.
In reality, social media won’t deliver the most sales directly. However, that doesn’t make it any less relevant. Instead, it’s a case of knowing where to look to determine the payoff.
