Many people including small business owners are starting to recognize the need to measure their marketing initiatives online. Are you making any money from your campaigns? Are you increasing your awareness online? Getting any sales? If you are new to social media, how are you going to measure your social media marketing campaign?
If you are only looking at how much traffic you generate from social media, how many new “likes” you getting to your Facebook page or the amount of new followers you are getting on Twitter, are these useful measures to determine the effectiveness of your social media campaign? When you are getting a new retweet on one of your messages, you may be increasing your reach, but are you gaining a new customer? And when it comes to the bottom line, are you actually making any money from your campaign?
If you are a small business owner and you have limited resources and time to measure the true effectiveness of your campaign, I suggest that you focus only on two metrics you can use for measurement. These are Facebook insights and Google Analytics.
Facebook insights
While your owned media such as your website and blog are typically the channels that you will use to promote your brand and your business, Facebook is a great way that you can engage with your audience. With Facebook Insights, you can view the number of people who are talking about your page and what the reach is of the posts you make on your page. In both instances, the higher the number, the better chance you have at growing your Facebook Page.
How Facebook calculates this is with their own algorithm called EdgeRank. This algorithm calculates how often a fan interacts and views your updates and it determines whether or not your updates appear on a user’s news feed. The more you engage and interact with your audience, regardless of how many likes or Fans you have, the higher your EdgeRank (visibility).
Google Analytics
While many people are using Google Analytics as the norm to track traffic to your website, one effective way to measure your social media strategy is to dig a bit deeper into your stats than simply focusing on the traffic you are getting. While knowing where your traffic originates from is very important and how long people are staying on your pages, for many people pressed for time, one of the most important parts of Google Analytics are to track conversion rates. By setting up realistic goals on your Google Analytics account, you can track and measure how many people are completing an action. This is great if you are getting lots of traffic, but it is even better if your traffic converts.
While there are literally hundreds of metrics you can use to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, time and money are always of the essence for a small business owner. If you need to limit your focus with your marketing campaigns, Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, and the open rates of your email campaigns are valuable metrics that will provide you with data of who you are reaching and if they are doing what you want them to do.