Web Analytics and Social Media

Social Media analytics

A blog post I read today, talks about the ways to measure the ROI of social media investments. According to the post:

…we’re looking for evidence of impact on value creation. Not just the number of blog post responses, or the share-of-voice in the online world, but actual correlations to incremental customer acquisition, retention, and purchase behavior…
…we marketers don’t do ourselves any favors by trying to disconnect it from financial value just because it’s hard to make the links.

It’s true that social media is harder to put value on but it’s not impossible.
There are ways of tracking the value of social media in terms of “hard core” ROI and this is where web analytics comes into play.

Using Web analytics to measure social media ROI

Tracking short term benefits is fairly easy by tracking referrals and seeing whether visitors coming from social media sites convert.
Customer retention and purchase behavior tracking is done by segmenting the traffic from the various sources and monitored over a slightly longer time period. This is usually done with the help of persistent cookies that allow us to monitor returning visitors that had their first visit from social media sites.

Social media marketing plan

Another point that appeared in the post was about the ability to create a serious marketing plan when it comes to social media:

Show me the model of what you think will happen, how you’ll try to measure it, and what the implications would be if your assumptions were right. Then show me that you’ve methodically assessed the risks of being wrong (even if they are negligible).

Because of the nature of social media traffic this is somewhat harder to do right. As with any new marketing media, first we need to test the response to our campaigns (a blog post or a short twitter can and should be considered a marketing campaign). There are already quite a lot of articles on the impact that social media has on visitors to a site, both good and bad, but because each site has its own unique “personality” the response will differ somewhat from one site to another.

The best way to predict what impact a major social media campaign will have on your site is to run a few smaller ones and carefully monitoring their results.

Social media and analytics

Weather you’re using Google analytics, ClickTracks or any other web analytics software, you should be able to monitor social media traffic the same way you do regular search traffic or Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns once you have your web analytics and tracking systems setup properly.
 
By creating different visitors segments and going over each segment’s behavior patterns while on your site you will be able to not only measure the ROI of social media investments but also to predict, to a certain degree, the behavior of social media traffic and use those analytics results in your next marketing plans for social media.