One of my clients has been managing a large online marketing campaign since early 2007 and has had to recently face a cut-back in her marketing budget. She needs to know which channels she is getting most value out of and where she can trim back without losing many of the benefits she is seeing.
It is situations like this where marketers see the value of measuring everything.
As my client has discovered, even when things are going well, you need to know where and why you are successful. What you measure, after all, you get more of!
First you have to decide your goals.
This particular client is only concerned with three things:
- Generating awareness
- Gaining subscribers
- Selling product
This boils down to traffic and conversions. Conversion to subscriber and conversion to customer.
Conversion Rate Calculation
Her social media efforts are competing against the offline marketing and the company Google Adwords campaigns.
This helps her a great deal because she has results to compare against. In the adwords example we have a perfect comparison, we can see the very best conversion rates that she needs to match or exceed.
Take a look at your own Google Analytics and you will be able to filter down and determine where your traffic is coming from and how much.
See how much traffic you get per channel
Once you have your traffic sources, then set up a “goal” in Google Analytics.
You might be surprised when you look to see where your conversions are coming from, I was!
Not all traffic is made equal!
One of my niche sites was receiving an overall 2.05% conversion rate. This is not a site I spend a lot of time developing high quality traffic for, I don’t even post, just haven’t had time. I thought I would analyze the site on my clients behalf to show the steps.
What I did not realize is the big traffic sources such as Digg and Reddit were sending ZERO conversions. Not a single Digger had made it to the “thank you” page. Contrast this with a 7% conversion from certain Google keywords, and even Bing was supplying 0.42%! Twitter however was providing solid conversions consistently, which I kind of hoped would be the case.
While the exact numbers were off, my client found a similar result.
Now I do not want to leave you with the wrong impression …
- Each audience, niche and campaign will provide wildly different results
- Traffic, opt-ins and sales are NOT the main goal of every social media campaign, nor should they be
- Social Networking is vital for content marketing success and for SEO, regardless of the direct traffic
We know my client has received a lot of links and contacts through social bookmarking so her efforts are going to be modified but not to the point of throwing away Reddit and Digg. She will however not be using them every day.
Do make sure you are measuring and tracking your metrics. Find out where your efforts are being placed and work out what benefits you are getting and what you want to achieve. You might be surprised how wrong your assumptions are.
