HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI

84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.

Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media.

Defining Clear Goals

As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.

Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.

Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.
Metrics Tools





Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.

The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.

Back in January, we did a round-up of 50+ Tools for Measuring Web Traffic. Here are some of our favorites and some additional social media related measuring options:

Google Analytics — It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

Omniture — Omniture has a slew of services available for businesses, including components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.

TweetMeme Analytics — This is useful if you use TweetMeme’s retweet buttons on your sites. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but focused on TweetMeme.

PostRank Analytics — This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats. This can be really important for sentiment analysis (more on that later).

HootSuite — HootSuite is a great Twitter manager but also offers impressive analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.

Be sure to check out our post on Tracking Social Media Analytics for help with these tools and for the type of data you want to look for. Also check out some other reasons to use a URL shortener.
Sentiment Analysis






Having a metric for something like Twitter mentions is pretty meaningless if you don’t know if those mentions are positive or negative. This is where sentiment analysis is interesting. Sentiment is also a useful baseline to look at before implementing or changing a social media strategy and calculating your ROI.

We’ve written a lot about different sentiment analysis tools for Twitter and here are some highlights:

Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.

Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.

Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.

Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.

Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses. We mentioned them in our round-up of reputation tracking tools last year.
Social Media Product Suites





These products can be extremely useful in measuring ROI on social networks but are primarily designed for bigger brands and corporations. Still, in terms of all-encompassing tool sets, these tools have the edge.

Vitrue SRM — We’ve covered the Twitter Pages component of Vitrue SRM (Social Relationship Manager) before, but the whole suite is really dedicated to managing and getting the most information out of your social media accounts. Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics. Vitrue SRM is basically a CMS for controlling and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

ContextOptional — ContextOptional offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.

Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. Although this isn’t ROI in the most clear-cut terms, by improving customer service and getting a handle on problems quickly, brands can save themselves from potentially costly mistakes. Those savings can be taken into account when computing your ROI.
Making the Data Usable

This is the hard part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

Do you see any trends? Is traffic up to your store after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Does store traffic correlate with more sales when evaluating that same data? Does a higher sentiment analysis on Twitter lead to more sales or more visits?

Finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.
What do you think?

What do you use when measuring social media ROI? Is ROI the best term for measuring impact of social media, or should something else be used? What have you found to be good indicators of things that work and don’t work when using social media?

Six Ways to Optimize Your Landing Pages For Improved Lead Generation

Marketing studies have shown that 93% of B2B buyers begin their buying process using the Internet.  When examining your website’s effectiveness, take into consideration the all-important landing page.   A high quality page not only ranks higher in the search engines but it also can earn more exposure in your pay-per-click campaigns and reduce your cost per click. Follow these six ways for increasing conversion rates and improving lead generation

1. Focus on a call to action:

Don’t worry about including navigation on your landing page, as this is not your homepage. Use an arrow graphic to show users how and where to get what they came for and build your content around fulfillment such as free downloads, reports or demos.  Keep the copy short and sweet focusing on the benefits and the call to action.

2. Think Branding:

This is your first opportunity to introduce users to your business.  Include a logo that reinforces brand recognition.  Include a mock-up of the white paper or photo of the webinar presenter.  Be sure to make your graphics click-able as a recent internet study by Eyeblaster showed that viewers who interact with web pages have higher retention rates than those that don’t.

3. Reassure your Prospect:

Create an atmosphere that encourages users to part with their information without feeling like they are risking their privacy.  Privacy statements, customer testimonials, Better Business Bureau logos and guarantees are a great way to do this.  Give them a reason to give you their information.  Set up the problem, talk about your solution and deliver the goods (content) in a professional manner, with biographical information on your author or web presenter when appropriate.

4. Say Thank You:

You can never make a first impression twice. Thank your prospect for sharing his time and information with you. Have a page that confirms their submission and tells them you appreciate their visit. Don’t neglect to show them another offer as well. Also make sure the email they receive in response is well written, short and easy to understand and includes your logo and contact info.

5. Be Search Engine Friendly:

Another important part of landing pages is the URL. The title of the page along with the URL path is weighed heavily. Make the best use of the 1024 characters available to you.  Optimize your URL with things a search engine likes, such as dashes rather than underscores and include keywords whenever possible.

6. Test:

Testing is an essential tool for lead generation.  Landing pages are one of the most valuable things to test and the best B2B marketers are test fanatics. Your landing page has plenty of elements to test, including headlines, copy, forms, offers, designs, colors and more.  Testing the landing page can lead to increased conversion rates of up to 115% or more.

Follow this equation: Take the number of conversions per day and divide it by ten.  Next, take your testing period in weeks and divide by two.  Multiply the two results to determine the number of versions you can comfortably test in your testing period.

Optimizing landing pages doesn’t have to be complicated.  Taking into consideration how you like to be treated as a user who visits a web site can be valuable when creating user-friendly elements.  Use these tips to build the most efficient landing page for lead generation and fueling the sales funnel.

Automated rules now available to all advertisers

Back in December, Google Adwords announced the limited release of AdWords automated rules, a new feature that lets you save time by scheduling automatic changes to your account based on criteria that you specify. Today we’re happy to announce that this feature is available in all accounts.

If you regularly log in to your account to pause or enable ads, adjust your bids, or perform other manual tasks, automated rules may be just the tool you need to manage your account more efficiently. For a step-by-step guide to creating an automated rule and best practices to get you started, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Keep in mind that when scheduling automatic rules, it’s important to check your work periodically to make sure your rules are having the desired impact on your account performance.

Once you’ve given automated rules a try, we want to hear about it! Share your feedback and ideas for improving automated rules by filling out this survey.

7 Considerations for Tracking Social Media Success

7 Considerations for Tracking Social Media Success



With more and more marketers jumping onto the social media bandwagon, a lot of questions come up. Is it possible to track metrics and ROI? What are other companies doing? Why isn’t it working? Being prepared to answer questions like these can make a difference in how a company interacts with social media and if they can succeed.

How can we track social media?
Unfortunately, there is no one “most effective” social media tracking system. Marketers across the web are still working to figure out how to measure social media, how to attach ROI, and how to sell the benefits of participation on the social web to those that don’t “get it”.

Social media marketing isn’t like an email campaign where you can track the number of emails sent out, the number that were opened, the number of clicks, visits, leads and conversions all in one process. Much of what happens in the social media world happens behind a login and the old ways of tracking web visitor analytics just doesn’t work in that scenario.

Just like any kind of marketing, each company has their own set of objectives and reasons for reaching them via social media channels. That means different methods and approaches to the listening, monitoring and measuring of both social web and web marketing activities at large. The field of social media analytics is still very new. Here are 7 considerations as you evaluate what will work best in your social media tracking.

Quality over Quantity
This has been said again and again and lots of people still feel that the more followers/friends/subscribers/connections they have, the better. The reality is, quantity is not and end goal for lead or sales generation outcomes. What good is it to have 13,000 followers if 1/3 of them are spam accounts and 1/3 are auto followers who will never engage with you? Sure 13,000 looks good to those who can only focus on numbers, but what is the quality of those 13,000? Seth Godin mentioned at the MIMA Summit that all you need is an audience of about 1,000. But it needs to be the right 1,000 people.

Hearing vs. Listening
Have you stopped to think about who is actually paying attention in social networks? A person or a brand may have X number of followers or friends, but how many of them are actively listening at any given time? How many people do you ACTUALLY reach when you post a tweet, make a status update or blog post? Subscriber counts and reach are two different things. Think of it like a college professor talking to students: How many of them are paying attention during a lecture? With social media participation it’s the same thing; you need to realize that not everyone is always hearing what you have to say and factor in the difference between connections and actual reach.

Engage & Participate
Effective social media marketing is about is engaging and participating. If a marketer joins a social network and focuses on promoting themselves, product or company, they’ll get an entirely different set of outcomes than those they have goals for. Think about it. Social means to be conversational, friendly, helpful. When participating in social channels, talk to other members of the community, participate in the conversations and give people a reason to interact with you. Add a little romance before you ask to get engaged  

Social Media is About Being Where the Conversation Is.
Marketers need to stop and think about where their audiences are online and where relevant conversations are happening. That could be niche social networks, forums and blogs. Those niche areas may have fewer people, but will more than likely have more engagement value for relevant products or services being shared. To find those niche communities and conversations, use social media monitoring software. Free tools include Google Alerts or Social Mention. Low cost tools include Trackur and PostRank Analytics.

Assign Value to Get Value.
Whether it’s a tweet, retweet, a status update, comment, photo upload or story submission, if you want to find out how valuable it is you have to assign a value. It doesn’t matter how or what that value is, but setting up some sort of system will help determine what’s working and what’s not.

Define an Objective.
Before jumping into social networking, it’s essential to set an objective. Going in and participating with social network and media sharing sites just to participate may not bring the kind of results you’d like. A clear objective as part of a social media strategy should be set so you know what you are working towards. It will guide your messaging, behaviors, networking activity as well as the kind of content you seek and share.

Social Media is An Investment.
Social media success takes time. The seeds of relationships need to grow and you’ll need to invest what’s needed to make it work for whatever end goals that are set. Expecting results in a month or two isn’t realistic; it may take a year or more. It really depends on the Roadmap that guides your: Audience > Objectives > Strategy > Tactics > Tools > Measurement. Effective social media participation is about building a network and building trust. That doesn’t happen overnight. Be patient, do it right, and you’ll be rewarded in the long run.

What other considerations should be in this list? If you’ve undertaken new social media programs with your company, what were some of the measurement and analytics hurdles that you overcame?

PostRank Combines Google Analytics With Social Media Stats

Traditional web analytics tools like Google Analytics are a great for both small and large bloggers and publishers. However, traffic data can only tell you so much. As conversations surrounding blog posts start to take in place other places (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.) and people use tumble blogs like Tumblr and Posterous to quickly comment and share helpful information, tracking that data and its correlation to overall traffic numbers can become really, really helpful.For smaller publishers or bloggers, getting all of this information in one place can be difficult. Today, PostRank is publicly launching PostRank Analytics as a way to capture social engagement and traditional metrics all in one place.

When you sign-up for a PostRank Analytics account, you just need to enter in your blog address and connect your Google Analytics account. You can also enter in your Twitter username, so that your Twitter follower stats can be monitored in tandem with your web traffic.

What PostRank Analytics does is take the Google Analytics data and show you the pageviews, Twitter followers and “engagement score” for the day before. You can see how your figures stand up over time, by week, month or quarter.

But that’s just the beginning. The really cool part about PostRank Analytics comes when you evaluate individual blog entries. Not only can you see your total page views, unique visitors, bounce rate and average time on the post for each entry — you can also see how many people have tweeted about the post, how many comments it received, if there are any FriendFeed or Reddit reactions, was it re-posted on Tumblr, etc.
You can also see all of those reactions underneath the post. You get points for engagement and you can quickly determine which posts have high engagement scores and which don’t. What’s nice about this system is that you can compare the raw traffic metrics against the level of social engagement. So you might notice that something is a strong traffic performer, but has lower engagement details. Or maybe something is the opposite.

You can also see what types of posts tend to work best on what types of networks, and what impact that has on your traffic number or Twitter followers.

Earlier this week, I wrote about a new study that said 84% of social media programs don’t measure ROI. Although blogging is only one aspect of social media, it’s one of the easiest ways to measure feedback.

PostRank Analytics is a great add-on to Google’s own data. I would love to see the service monitor other types of social media accounts (like Facebook friends or fans) or plug into other analytics engines, but the data that PageRank Analytics can offer already is fantastic.

You can sign-up for a free 30-day test drive. Pricing starts at $9 a month after that.

How do you measure your blog and social metrics?