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| Tracking the KPIs of Social Media Posted: 06 Sep 2011 04:51 PM PDT Posted by randfish Social media receives a massive amount of attention on the web and attracts a great deal of interest from marketers, too. The primary complaint of those who invest seems to be consistent: it's hard to measure the impact to the bottom line. On this point, I must concede - while social's an exciting new area for online marketers, its value isn't always commensurate with the effort required and even when it is, it's tough to prove that point to clients or executives asking for justification. This post is here to help. In it, I'll try to take a brief look at the topics surrounding this problem and offer some solutions, tools and methodologies to make things easier. Why + Where Social MattersSocial media has an analytics problem. Whereas many other sources - ads, organic search, referrals, bookmarks - all drive traffic that directly converts (i.e. results in a purchase/signup action), social traffic is very temporal. Visitors from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, et al. are known to visit a page and quickly depart. This leaves marketers struggling to understand the value of these channels. High bounce rates, low browse rates and awful conversion rates make social the black sheep of the referring traffic sources. I'll try to explain the problem, and the reason why social still matters, despite these poor metrics, in visual form: On the web, visitors are rarely buyers (or "conversion action" takers of any kind) on a first visit. The web's a tool for discovery, research and investigation and people employ it that way. They browse around, find things that are interesting, discover potential needs or desires, further examine the options and eventually make a purchase decision. For most, the web is less like the checkout aisle at the grocery store (stocked with tempting treats and not-so-tempting magazines, at least IMO) and more like the considered purchase of a grill, television set or automobile. Social media isn't the deal closer - it's the channel that creates potential for a future conversion. Social media can create brand familiarity and drive visitors to content that further draws them in, but it very rarely directly answers an expressly-stated need. Let's take a look at a typical buying cycle for someone who takes a free trial of SEOmoz's software and look where social falls in the process: Twitter and Facebook are early on in the process, likely prior to this customer's realization of need or knowledge of the product. Social channels are likely to be partially responsible for thousands of free trials at SEOmoz, but given the tools currently available, we'd have a very tough time figuring out just how much social participation and presence brought to the company. Another great illustration of this phenomenon comes via Eloqua's Content Grid, which explores the types of content shared on various channels (including social media) and its impact on the buying process: Social media does lots of good things for businesses and brands on the web:
The Atlantic recently had an article talking about why good advertising works, and many of the same principles apply to social media but are, in my opinion, even more powerful because they're not interruption-based, but inbound and organic. If 10 of the people I follow on Twitter or Google+ start sharing links to a new startup's website, I'm going to be far more engaged, impressed and enticed than if that same startup put banner ads on some of the websites I browse. Both create brand awareness, but social is more personal, more trustworthy and more likely to capture my click. We know that social is a softer, more-difficult-to-measure traffic source, but we're inbound marketers and that means we can't live without data :-) So let's explore some of the ways we can monitor this channel. Which Social Metrics to TrackIn the social media analytics world, there are several key types of metrics we're interested in tracking:
Getting the right metrics to answer these questions requires segmenting by network. Not every question will have direct answers in the data, so we may need to make assumptions or inferences. Facebook offers a relative wealth of data about nearly all the metrics we care about through their built-in product for brand pages, Facebook Insights:
Here you can track key metrics over time, including the size of your fanbase, the reach and effectiveness of your content, the quantity of likes and shares of your content, demographics of your fans and more. Insights also has a very unique and powerful feature - integration on your website. Using a small bit of Javascript code, you can embed the Facebook Insights functionality on your site and receive information about all the users visiting your pages that are logged into Facebook. Since it's been well-covered on SEOmoz (and around the web), I won't dwell too much on Insights other than to say it's the most robust of the built-in, social platform analytics tools by far. More on Insights:
Twitter and Facebook are likely to be the largest two social networks for referring traffic to most sites (StumbleUpon purportedly sends more outbound traffic, but is more of a discovery/browsing engine than a true social network), but while Facebook has relatively sophisticated analytics built into their platform, Twitter does not. This means tracking growth of metrics over time requires third-party tools (or a lot of time collecting data manually), which I'll cover in a section below. The key metrics I care about on Twitter are:
In addition to these relatively standard metrics, I'd love to be able to see the impact of my interactions in Twitter on follower count, engagement, etc. For example, if my account sends a tweet that earns me 100 new followers, it would be terrific to see that growth, but currently isn't possible (to my knowledge). All of these metrics are showing the growth, reach and traffic-level impact of my Twitter activity, but none of them help with the full-lifecycle tracking shown above. In an ideal world, I'd want to see the bottom-line impact of my Twitter interactions, but this is very challenging to achieve. Luckily, Google's Analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, wrote a great post on tracking Twitter here, which can serve as further reference. It's often mentioned that in analytics, nothing is worth tracking unless it can be used to take action and improve. For the metrics above, the primary action you're tracking is your own and the key to taking better actions is comparing successful interactions, tweets and content against less successful ones to determine what has the best impact on growing your audience, bringing visits to your site and, eventually, driving conversion actions. LinkedIn functions like a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. Connections require acceptance from both sides, but public entities (like company pages) and groups can be followed. LinkedIn tends to be a great social network for those who are recruiting talent or involved in B2B sales and marketing. It's often far less effective as a pure consumer/B2B channel. Like Facebook, LinkedIn has some built-in analytics for businesses, one for individual profiles, and lots of data points that are useful to track, including:
Few third-party tools exist to help with measurement of LinkedIn, but over time, I hope to see more tools in the social media analytics field achieve success with Twitter and Facebook and expand to LinkedIn and beyond. Google+ Google's new social network is still relatively young, but given Google's intent to make it part of the signals that influence web search rankings and considering the dramatic growth (to 25 million+ members) in the first two months after launch, it's already worthy of marketers' attention. Unfortunately, the network doesn't yet have any sophistication around metrics tracking, and very few third-party apps have integrated Google+ (an API and oAuth functionality still do not exist in robust ways). Despite this, there's plenty of interesting metrics worth tracking, it's just insanely frustrating because even raw counts are unavailable for many of these. Hopefully, Google will add some soon (heck, if you work on the Google+ team and are doing analytics for users/brands, please consider this list!):
Reddit, StumbleUpon, Quora, Yelp, Flickr, and YouTube Depending on the quantity and value of the traffic that other social networks send, there may indeed be additional metrics worth tracking. For SEOmoz, StumbleUpon, Slideshare, Reddit and Quora are all in our top 50 referrers, and each sends 500+ visits/month. These are likely worth some investment on the metrics and effort front, and if small quantities of contribution/participation yield large returns, more investment is likely warranted. Blogs + Forums The world of social started out as one where discussion sites (forums, Q+A, bulletin boards and the like) and the blogosphere reigned supreme. Eventually, consolidation and massive adoption of the major networks (those mentioned above) took over the hearts and minds of the press, but the social web is still very much alive in the blogosphere and forum world. Marketers have massive opportunities in these spaces, too. At SEOmoz, we have tens of thousands of visits each week from blogs and discussion sites of all sizes, and participation/interaction with those sources often yields fantastic results in referral traffic, mindshare and links. Many brands do likewise, hiring community managers or evangelists to engage in the sites where industry topics are discussed and building up strong, recognizable profiles that help bring awareness and produce traffic+links. Thus, as responsible inbound marketers, it's our job to measure these channels and quantify their impact.
For any inbound marketing channel (social or otherwise) you're considering, I really like this process: Losing a few hours to channels that don't provide value is minimal next to the value of discovering and participating on those that do! If you're curious about this process and want to dive deeper, this presentation may be helpful. Tools for Measuring Social Media MetricsThe number of tools available to track social media has grown exponentially over the last 3 years, and while I'll be unable to list all of them, this will hopefully provide a good sample set:
If you have tools you love, please feel free to add them in the comments (links are certainly welcome, too). OnReact in the comments noted this great post on tools specifically for Google+, some of which can be useful to gather the data above. Several other tools mentioned in the comments (apologies for my initial overlook): Obviously, there's a ton of metrics and data worthy of attention, and no single platform to combine them (at least, not yet). For now, marketers are stuck with a combination of tools, manual collection, visit tracking via analytics and plenty of questions about the value of social media. However, much like the SEO space, I expect that we'll see an increasing growth of metrics, tools, sophistication from marketers and value derived through participation and network growth. It's exciting to be an early adopter in this space :-)       |
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