How do you know how well your brand is doing on social media? How can you tell whether you’re getting the engagement you want, as well as the traffic you need?
You could look at every single post to see how many likes and shares it has received. However, that would take a lot of time, and it wouldn’t provide you with all of the information you need.
Thankfully, there are tools available to help you track your social media traffic. One that’s at the top of most marketers’ list is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics has proven to be a useful tool for measuring the success of email marketing campaigns, but it can also be used to measure how you’re doing on social media.
How to use Google Analytics to measure traffic
Start by logging in to your Google Analytics dashboard. Then, click on Acquisition > Traffic > Channels. Next, click on Social. This will show you all of the social media platforms you’re on.
Source: Monster Insights
The metrics in Google Analytics can tell you:
- Your bounce rate
- How many people engage with your content
- How many transactions you received based on certain campaigns
- How much email traffic you received
- How long people stayed on a particular page of your website
- Demographics of your audience.
You can add UTM parameters, which are tags, to your social media posts. These tags will be reported to Google Analytics and show which social media platform brings the most traffic to your website, as well as what kind of content they’re interested in.
How to measure the ROI of your social media campaign
The whole goal of social media marketing should be to get more website traffic.
Everything you do on social media should have a purpose behind it. Your posts should appeal to your target audience and help or entertain them in some way, and your interaction with your customers or potential customers should also benefit them and prove your awesome customer service skills.
All of this can and will be worth the time and effort you put into it because it’ll result in the ultimate ROI: traffic back to your website.
To evaluate the success of your email and social media campaigns, regularly evaluate Google Analytics to see just how much website traffic you’re getting.
If you’re not getting that much, you can alter your marketing strategy to see what fits your audience the best.
Make adjustments along the way, based on metrics, and you’ll soon start to see a higher ROI.
Does it really matter?
When you set up a social media account for your business, you need to incorporate useful tracking tools as well.
Many of these are on the social media sites themselves. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even LinkedIn have analytics tools built in that can help you track your progress.
To benefit from them, though, you need to analyze them.
For social media marketing analytics to be useful, they must be tracked, evaluated, and measured.
Analyzing the progress of your brand—including your traffic and engagement—will show you how to invest your time on social media.
The first mistake brands make when they get onto social media is not having a clear marketing strategy in place. The second is not analyzing the results of their campaigns. Without analytics, you won’t know which posts:
- Are more likely to be shared
- Appeal to your target audience the most
- Result in more traffic to your website
- Result in sales conversions.
Not paying attention to this valuable data will result in a waste of time, effort, and marketing resources.
What now?
The next step in your social media marketing efforts should be to streamline your efforts. The purpose of utilizing tools, technology, and analytics should not only be to improve your bottom line, but also to help your team save time.
Campaign Monitor has multiple social media analytics integrations. Start implementing these tools into your marketing strategy and you’ll save time and money, while getting the valuable information you need to boost your social media marketing results.