Are You Measuring Your Social Media Efforts? Eric Patterson

We, as marketers and business owners, have noticed the necessity and impact a superior online presence can be to our companies and ourselves. It appears a few years ago that just having a website where potential customers can check out our services or goods was all that was needed.  Not to mention the fact that doing email marketing campaigns was going above and beyond for an online marketing campaign. Then, last year the social media boom hit and we had to focus more time and energy into keeping our online presence up to date and on target. We seem to be rolling into a new era of internet, where customers are not going to be finding us, but we have to find them. Not only do we have to find them but appeal to them and on their forum. Now, as a business, we have Facebook pages and Twitter followers which we are constantly trying to get interested in our business and convert them from fans to customers. The question is, how do you measure the posts, email blasts, and tweets to know if they are benefiting your company? I turn to Google Analytics!

Most of us probably have Google Analytics already installed on our websites, but how many people have started to look into the Analytics Source Reports to find out where our hard efforts are best kept? Of course, the best option is to campaign tag all of our off-site links so we can measure exactly what tweet or wall post urged potential visitors to become customers. Which is what I want to explain a little further so you can make sure your efforts are going to good use. Analytics gives us four nice parameters that we can use to categorize a visitor that clicked on a link: source, campaign, medium, and content. These parameters can be set with any word in a way that allows us to decide how we want to see the data. Which means we can set the parameters anyway we want in order to give us the organized reports in our Analytics.

Let's just jump to an example: I have written a blog post on my website and I would like to make a wall post on my Facebook page to tell my followers about my new post. My first step is to decide how to fill in the parameters and I come up with this:

source: facebook
campaign: blog
medium: wall_post
content: measuring_social_media_efforts

So why did I choose these? The source metric is an easy one for most applications and I just use a simple name to describe where I am putting this link, in this case Facebook. If I was putting this in an email then I would use "email", and if I was tweeting about this then I would put "twitter". The campaign is a way to describe what I am trying to promote or sell. I am promoting my blog, but if I was a shoe's salesman then I might put "may_loafers_blowout". In general it is how we want to categorize the event or item. Medium helps to narrow down the source metric to help us quantify that source a little deeper. Since this is going on my Facebook page as a wall post then "wall_post" fits the bill perfectly. The content is what I use (not the official definition of the content term according to Google) to give the exact item or page I am trying to get customers to do with my link. Remember, we can put any word into the parameters and we get to fill them in based on how WE want to see our data organized. So, even though Google gives the definition of the content parameter to be for A/B testing I use the parameter to signify with deeper detail what article I am linking. Since I don't use A/B testing for most social media tracking this allows me to use this parameter to my benefit instead of just leaving it blank. Here is a quick link to Google's definitions for the dimensions if you want to read more: "Understanding campaign variables".

Now we need to build the link that we want to post. There are a few ways of doing this but the easiest is to use Google's Url Builder. It is a really simple form that after you fill in the fields and get generate it will give you back the new link. After getting our newly created (and somewhat long but don't worry yet) link we open up our Facebook page or favorite desktop application. On our business fan page, we create a little note to the consumer and paste our long link to our blog post with the campaign tags appended. Luckily, Facebook will go out and read our title and description tags and make the link and post nicely formatted and pretty for our consumers to see. That is it! We wait and watch the data as your fans click on the link.

So it sounds simple, and it really is. One thing you may be thinking is how confusing this can get with a lot of social media posts. What I recommend to my customers is starting a spreadsheet or text file so you can start to track and maintain your names in a simple matter. There is also another good reason to start a file for collecting the names and it comes in the fashion of consistency. Since Analytics has no idea what these mean and just collects the data into the appropriate bins, we have to be consistent with our naming conventions and case. I like to adopt a few rules, especially when you have more then one person putting off-site links out there. The few rules that I stick to is keeping everything all lower-case and replace spaces with underscores. If one link you use "facebook" in all lowercase and then a day later you use "Facebook" with a capital 'F', then Analytics will treat these as two different sources and organize the data separately. This can lead to some missed data in your reports if you didn't realize some were lower case and others were capitalized. Good record keeping and consistency become your best friend.

What can we do with this data? There really is an endless amount of possibilities to that question but some of the biggest questions you can now answer are: What was the best source for my Measuring Social Media Efforts blog? How does a wall post on Facebook compare to a tweet on Twitter or an email? Did my audience want to read my Measuring Social Media Efforts blog post versus my Using Google Analytics for Banner Ad Verification blog post? How many of my goals were met from the blog campaign?

If you wanted to see first hand one of the ways I use Analytics to track social media's effects on my website; then click on the Facebook Share icon at the top of the post and allow it to post on your Facebook Wall. Now, go into your Facebook Profile/Wall Page and click on the link that got posted. If you look at your address bar once this blog page is loaded again then you will see the Analytics campaign tagged strings in the address bar. In this first hand example, I dynamically created the tagged link and gave it to Facebook to use when you click on the Share icon. I can now track how many visitors I get based on my readers sharing this information. If you think an article is interesting enough to post it to your wall for their friends and colleagues to read, then I want to be able to track that effect. The added benefit to using the campaign tagged links in social networks is the campaign tagged parameters stay appended to the link on any other re-shares or re-tweets that your friends may also do. Since we all know the golden egg of social media marketing is the exponential effect it can have, we can now start to get a better insight to how that viral movement got started if it does occur.

Since we don't live in a perfect world it would be untruthful to tell you there are not pitfalls. One pitfall is the necessity to push the people to our site where the Analytics code is running, this is the only way we can track the visit. Unfortunately, a lot of our social media updates are not geared towards links to our site; but if there is a way to provide to a link to a page on your site then it is worthwhile to take the time to tag the link. Also, if we have automatic update/status links between our Facebook and Twitter accounts then it will be pushing the wrong tagged source across those mediums. That can be a real pain for us but remember, we get to decide what all the parameters/metrics for the tagging are set to. For instance, if we have all our stuff linked together then we could always decide to use "social_media" as our source parameter and change medium to just "post" or "update". Among all great things there are drawbacks but once you have tried it for yourself and get to see your newly found data then it will be hard to live without it.