Converge Consulting

A question that we are frequently asked is “How can I measure the effectiveness of my social media efforts?” It can be difficult to measure many of the pieces that you may want to measure, but measuring the results of social media is probably easier than you thought.

As you go down the road of web measurement, always start with a goal in mind. When you have your goal in place, then provide context for the measurement. Let’s break this down a bit more: How are we defining effectiveness? If the goal is for a user to download a PDF file of an alumni magazine, then you are successful if someone downloads the PDF. This is a simple example, but can still be applied to social media.

When we consider that effectiveness in our example has been defined as someone downloading the PDF, and if we apply the context of a social media source, then we are able to directly measure results from a social media channel.

We are able to perform this measurement because we are treating the website as a hub. All social media channels (and every other type of channel) are being funneled to our website so that we can properly track and measure every component. As long as you continue to treat your website as a hub for your communications, then you are in the perfect position to measure each channel.

What does this measurement look like?

The new version of Google Analytics provides an amazing ability to create customized dashboards. While you could customize dashboards in the previous version, the flexibility to segment the information by each dashboard section, or widget, in the new version is incredible. One possible way to monitor the effectiveness of social media is through a dashboard widget.

To set up your dashboard widget, select “+Add Widget” on the top left corner of the dashboard display. In this example, we will create the “Social Media Visitors and Value” widget as a “Timeline” widget. The metrics that we will select will be “Unique Visitors” and “Per Visit Goal Value.”

We will filter the data in the following manner:

“Only show Source Regular Expression facebook|twitter|digg|delicious|diigo|foursquare|myspace|stumbleupon”

I also have the widget linking to the new Social Engagement report in case I want to take a closer look.

If you set up the widget just as I have outlined, you will see a Timeline graph of how many visitors have come to your website from a social media channel and what the value of those visitors are based on the goal values that you have set up. This will start to show you how effective your social media channels are at getting people to complete your goals.

Let’s apply this to a real-world situation

You want to get your alumni to sign up for a special alumni event that you are hosting. You begin by creating a goal in Google Analytics for the event registration form so that when a user registers, they will be counted as a successful goal conversion. You decide to advertise the event extensively on Facebook and Twitter. After driving users to your website registration page from Facebook or Twitter, you will be able to measure how many users not only accessed your website from those social media advertisements, but also how many completed your desired goal of getting alumni to register.

Note that the example widget shows how social media channels work together across all campaigns and goals. However, with further filters and segments (context) you will be able to look closely at specific campaigns and goals to see how social media has driven users to complete your goals.

Try out the sample social media widget and let us know your thoughts. How are you using analytics to measure social media?