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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Going viral is every brand’s dream. Except maybe H&M…

Video has exploded in the past year or so with social platforms like YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram leading the pack. But, there’s still a heck of a lot to learn. Good thing we have data!

YouTube’s Analytics comes to the rescue. Improving video strategy and better understanding your audience is key to unlocking viral city. The guys over at Sprout Social broke down the need-to-knows for us. Tackling analytics just got sweeter than lemonade on a sunny day.

We plucked a few good points for you to read over, but ya have to click through to really squeeze the juice outta this one.

1. Estimated Earnings Report details earnings related to partner content, transactions, YouTube Red, and ads. YouTube notes that estimated revenue in YouTube Analytics may not be identical to finalized payments due to final adjustments during the payout period.
2. Watch Time Report aggregates data from all view sources to create a comprehensive look at how long people are watching your videos. You can use the tabs under the graph to filter the data by content type, geography, date, subscription status, YouTube product, and subtitles.
3. Audience Retention Report helps you understand whether or not your viewers are sticking to your videos. Based on these metrics and percentages, you can start to look for common threads among your top-performing content.
4. Playback Locations Report is where users are viewing your videos, while the traffic sources are how people find your content. Noteworthy metrics include:
   1. YouTube Watch Page
   2. YouTube Channel Page
   3. YouTube Other
   4. Embedded in External Websites and Apps:
5. Traffic Sources Report shows the sites and YouTube features that viewers used to find your content. Understanding whether viewers are searching directly on YouTube, clicking Suggested Videos thumbnails or following links from social networks lets you know if your optimization and promotion strategies are paying off.
6. The Comments Report summarizes how many people comment on your video. It’s also somewhere to gain unfiltered insight into how people feel about your content. If people are showing you love, make sure you respond accordingly. Remember, response time is critical, especially for customer support and tutorial videos.

Phew, that’s a mouthful. There’s still more to learn, though…

Having trouble coming up with creative ideas for your next video campaign? Maybe you need to step back in time for some inspiration? Like, way-way back. Lucozade Energy decided to take it back to biblical times with their latest ad campaign. The brand added some modern context to create a comedic take on the never told prequel story of David and Goliath.

The result? A killer video concept for a product in a saturated market.

Here’s why it worked:

• People are familiar with the storyline so less explaining was needed
• Humor is kinda necessary if you want to get the attention of the meme generation
• 1 minute doesn’t waste precious scroll time

The Takeaway: You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Use a creative approach to present concepts that people are familiar with while infusing your unique brand voice.