Of the 5 main activities of Social Media, measurement is perhaps the least understood and most widely overlooked.
Measuring your social media efforts is the only real way to determine what is working to drive real business value.
Today, my friends, I bestow upon you a gift: a social media dashboard template for Google Analytics.
But first….
How to see the dollar value of your social media
The template I’m about to give you provides an easy way to see how much traffic is originating from social sites, what content is most frequently shared socially, and the value of social traffic from several perspectives. But in order to calculate the dollar value of your social traffic, you first need to set Goals in Google Analytics. If you don’t know how to do that, you can learn to do that here.
And just for good measure, here are several other good posts about setting up Goals in Google Analytics:
- Google Analytics Official: About Goals
- 4 Google Analytics Goal Types That Are Critical To Your Business
- A Guide To: Goals And Funnels In Google Analytics
Once you have established goals, you can actually calculate the dollar value of your social traffic. I typically advise setting up conversion pages such as a “thank you” page the people are redirected to after opting in to a newsletter, filling out a contact form, or making a purchase.
Calculating value
You may be wondering:
“but how do I know what value to assign to a newsletter subscriber?”
“how do I know the value of a contact form submission?”
In most cases an estimated value will suffice. If you can be more exact, be more exact, but otherwise, try this…
Let’s say that over the course of the last two months you’ve gotten 10 contact form submissions, and of those submissions one person became a client. The conversion rate for that form (over the last two months) is 10%. 1/10 = 10%
Let’s say that the average value of a client for you is $10,000. Multiply the conversion rate by the average value of a conversion and we get our value: $10,000 x 10% = $1,000.
So each contact form submission is worth around $1,000 to you because you convert one out of every ten for an average sale of $10,000.
Maintaining a Positive ROI
If we continue with the above example, maintaining a positive ROI on our social media marketing simply means spending less than $1,000 to generate a contact form submission.
If you spend $2,000 on a video that generates four contact form submissions, the estimated ROI of that video is 100%. [(4000-2000)/2000] x 100 = 100%
The real ROI of that video could be more if those four contact form submissions are higher quality and convert at a higher rate. If two of the four submissions become clients the ROI is substantially higher. [(20,000-2000)/2000] x 100 = 900%
Variables and Attribution
There are plenty of other variables and there is always the question of attribution, but let’s keep today simple and save those conversations for another day.
Here’s your template:
