The Social Media Marketing Book

Metrics

A metric is a standard unit of measurement; you measure how tall you are in the metric of inches or feet. I think about metrics for social media marketing in two categories: on-site and off-site. On-site metrics measure activity that takes place directly on your site, whereas off-site metrics measure activity that happens on other sites where you and your customers interact.

On-Site

This section will explore some of the basic on-site metrics you can use to measure your social media efforts.

ROI

The most important thing you can measure as a marketer is your return on investment, or how much money your efforts are contributing to your business. Is the cost of your investment in social media outweighed by the value it is providing?

All decent analytics packages allow you to track certain actions on your site, whether they are purchases or the completion of lead forms. By labeling visitors who've reached these goals, you'll be able to trace them back to their referrers, the sites that sent those visitors to you, and evaluate the effectiveness of each source.

If you're a lead-based company, estimate how much a lead is worth to you by calculating what percentage of leads turn into business and what your average customer is worth to you. Most software lets you configure their tracking mechanisms to include the actual price of a sale or this value per lead, so you can assign a monetary figure to each source of social media traffic. Some analytics systems allow integration with your sales ...