Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 5th Edition

Chapter 7

Making Decisions by the Numbers

IN THIS CHAPTER

Making decisions based on metrics

Diagnosing and fixing problem campaigns

Keeping your online marketing grounded

It’s probably safe to say that all professionals whose companies use social media want to be able to measure their return on investment (ROI). By using the tools for assessing qualitative and quantitative results, including ROI, they can certainly count themselves among those who do!

However, there’s no point in collecting metrics just to save them in a virtual curio cabinet. The challenge is to figure out how to use the numbers to adjust your online marketing campaigns, whether they need fine-tuning or a major overhaul. In this chapter, we show you how to analyze problems, see what your data reveal, and then use the results to modify your marketing approach.

Using Metrics to Make Decisions

In spite of the hype, social media is, at its core, a form of strategic marketing communications. As a business owner, you must balance the subjective aspects of branding, sentiment, goodwill, and quality of leads with the objective performance metrics of traffic and click-through rate (CTR) and the business metrics of customer ...