When it comes to social media and its ROI, there is plenty of struggle and skepticism among brands. How to know whether your efforts are translating into social media growth? Is it paying off? Perhaps you have the feeling that you’re investing more and more into social, but not stepping back to ask yourself what’s going on. Determining and understanding your digital marketing analytics is crucial.
Do you know how to make sense of the piles of social media data you’ve gathered so far? If not, here are some critical data points for analyzing your digital marketing analytics and growth.
Digital Marketing Analytics: 11 Data Points to Track
By social media data, we mean statistics and metrics. It’s the information collected from social media networks that show how people view or engage with your profiles or content. This data provides insights regarding your social media strategy and growth. Some metrics of raw social data include:
- Shares
- Mentions
- Comments
- Likes
- New followers
- Impressions
- Keyword analysis
- Hashtag usage
- URL clicks
These key data points show the progress you’re making on social media. Here’s how you can measure them and what they all mean to your business.
Engagement
One of the best social media data points you can measure is social media engagement. You can do it by looking at the number of likes, comments, and shares your social media updates generate.
Likes
The more likes your social updates have, the more engagement they’ll cultivate. People prefer to associate themselves with favorite ideas and concepts. Therefore, likes show you that your content deserves more attention and has authority.
Shares
Shares are a more powerful indicator of brand loyalty. Everyone can like a post (without even reading it). However, when someone shares your post, it means that they have genuinely engaged with it. The number of shares your posts generate, tell you that customers want to recommend your brand to their peers. That’s pretty important in today’s age of social proof.
Comments
Comments are an essential data point for social media managers. When people comment on a post, it’s an opportunity to engage in a conversation with them. Valuable, informative, entertaining, and relevant content sparks conversations with your followers and builds trust. Even if the comments are neutral or negative, you can still learn something about their experience with your brand.
Mentions
Like in real life, people tend to talk about you when you’re not in the room. Many people who discuss brands on social platforms don’t even follow those brands. However, what they say about you is important. That makes looking at mentions important when trying to measure your social media growth.
- Clicks
Those who click on your website link are more likely to convert. Instead of generating primary traffic, you’re starting to cultivate leads. Remember that, when looking at clicks, you also need to think about bounce rate, shares, and likes as well. For example, if your bounce rate is as high as your clicks, then your landing pages probably aren’t appealing.
Reach
The purpose of your brand’s social media presence is reaching out to your target audience. Are you connecting and interacting with the right people? The reach metrics are there to show you how many people have seen your messages and how far they have traveled. Thus, when measuring your reach, you should pay attention to the following data points.
Impressions
Impressions show you how many times your post updates showed up on an individual’s news feed or timeline. For example, one user may see a post several times on their newsfeed (whenever some of their connections share it.) Therefore, one person can have multiple impressions. It’s a complex metric to measure, but typically a higher number is better.
Follower Count
If you want to know if you are reaching enough people, look at how many followers you have on each social platform. It’s the most obvious way to determine your reach. However, if your followers fail to engage, then it doesn’t matter if you have 200 or 20,000 followers.
Site Traffic
It’s crucial to know how much website traffic your social media campaigns generate. This is one of the most important digital marketing analytics you can track.
People who visit your site are interested to find out more about your brand. That is the initial step in converting them from followers and website visitors into buying customers. You’ll need to tweak your CTA if there is little improvement in your web traffic (even if your social posts receive a lot of engagement and reach.)
Conversions
When a person buys one of your products or services, he or she is referred to as a “conversion.” Hence, it’s one of the most critical metrics for many companies because it shows how your social media efforts are affecting your revenue.
Lead Conversion Rate
The lead conversion rate is a metric that indicates how many of your qualified leads buy something from you. Social media campaigns generate social proof for your company and can improve this metric.
Sales Revenue
One of the top reasons for launching a social media campaign is increased sales. Everyone wants to make a profit. So, it’s crucial to know how your social media efforts are affecting your bottom line. Find out how many conversions social media directed to your website.
The last two metrics are indicators of brand loyalty. By understanding the kind of impact your social campaigns have on your customers, you can improve brand advocacy, minimize cost-per-lead, and turn single-purchasing customers into loyal ones.
Cost-per-Lead
How much do your qualified leads cost you? Just take a look at the money you spend on social media campaigns. Social media focuses on connecting and building relationships with your target audience. Your cost-per-lead should decrease over time.
eClincher
Besides the features that enable you to interact with your audience through direct communication via social inbox, responding to comments, publishing posts, and more, eClincher has great data-gathering and analytics capabilities. You can analyze all your social media accounts and interpret the data thanks to easy-to-understand graphs. Also, eClincher supports integration with Google Analytics.
Digital marketing analytics are critical to finding new leads, improve customer service response time, and connect with those in need of your products. With eClincher, you can measure and know how to develop all these key metrics to optimize your audience and user growth.
