Gonna start your Wednesday morning off with a tough question:
How do you know if your social media efforts are successful?
We’re guessing your answer is something about the metrics you track and the reports you create. And that’s great. That should be your answer. But, bad news. According to research from CMI, 94% of marketers think there’s room for improvement in their metric reporting.
If you fall in that 94%, we’re gonna lend a hand today with a few reports you should be looking at to prove the success of your social efforts.
- Attribution Monitoring Report. Let’s start with Google Analytics and how it tracks conversions. It might be very misleading. By default, GA tracks conversions using Last Click Attribution. That means the path a website visitor most recently took to get to your website before converting gets 100% of the credit for that conversion (confused yet?). That’s not always good. If someone visits your website 3 times—once from organic, once from social, and once from paid search—and converts on the third visit, paid search will get 100% of the credit in Last Click Attribution. But in that case, it’s not entirely accurate. We typically like to use Time Decay Attribution for our clients.
- Dark traffic reporting. This isn’t as scary as it sounds. Promise. There could be a decent amount of traffic coming from social that GA can’t track. It’s a result of the rise of messaging apps (which are more popular than social media itself). Read more on this here.
- Ad frequency reporting. When it comes to Facebook ads, are you tracking the frequency of your ads? If not, you should be! The higher the frequency, the lower your relevance score. That’s a direct correlation.
- Cost Per Result (CPR) Report. This one is pretty simple—the lower your CPR is, the more effciient your campaigns are. And better yet, on Adwords and Facebook, you can set rules to turn off your ads when the CPR becomes too expensive.
Aaaand we’re outta room for more in this section. Take the jump to get all 12 reports.
