While most marketers have realized the rising importance of social media websites, evaluating social media ROI figures that compare against their business goals still remains a mystery. However, Google Analytics provides social reports that can help users evaluate social media ROI.
Google Analytics reports automatically collect data including pages, network referrals, visitor flow, and plugins to combine community with content. Google Analytics assigns value for each converted goal and delivers social reports that reveal which social platforms, content, and visitors got transformed into conversions.
Here are a few crucial features of Google Analytics that can help you to evaluate Social Media ROI.
Key Performance Indicators or KPIs can be set up as goals in Google Analytics Social Reports to measure performance by way of downloads, purchases, shares, demo requests, or even time per visit on your site. You can easily define goals and assign values by way of visit duration, page per visit, URL destination, etc., to measure performances. Google Analytics thus helps you determine the importance of social media in realizing your goals.
Google Analytics helps you to recognize social media networks that have resulted in diverting maximum traffic to your website, resulted in conversions, and provided the best quality of visitors. You can use the Visitor Flow Report to learn the path taken by your social media visitors and their behavior on your website, which in turn can help locate bottlenecks in the conversion path and take necessary action.
By using comparison reports provided by the Content Report, you can find out top social networks that brought in top quality visitors and most relevant content that can help in conversions. You can also use the Pages Report to identify viral or most shared content and use similar strategies in future to leverage that social data.
You can also use the Social Value Graph to compare visitors arriving from social networks and other channels like through search, referral, or direct. The Social Plug-Ins Report from Google Analytics can additionally help view social buttons that were used to share content and posts that were shared from your website.
Google Analytics also understands that visitors may not turn into conversions on a single visit. You can thus extract various social reports such as Last Interaction report that displays the social referral that transformed into a conversion. You can also identify those visitors that may not have turned into a conversion on the first visit, but in any subsequent visit by using the Assisted Social Conversions feature.
You can utilize the Social Sources report to view metrics such as pages per visit, time per visit, page views, and many more per network. In addition, you can also extract reports that reveal the number of visitors referred by social media sites such as Facebook, Linkedln, Twitter, etc., among others to identify sites that provide the best referrals and sites that need more effort. Additionally, you can also use Google’s Hub Partner Networks to get in-depth analysis of shared URLs and conversions.
With the ever-increasing usage and importance of social media sites, these above tips will help you extract key social reports and evaluate social media ROI. Google Analytics can surely help you view the impact on your bottom line and better manage your campaigns in the future.