A social media strategy is part of most companies’ communication concepts. Many working hours are invested if the accounts on the social networks are mainted on a regular basis. Now, you should want to see if there is any return on these investments. That is why we want to show you how you can qualify your traffic from social media.
How Important are Social Media for Your Business?
First you should quantify social media’s share of total traffic to tell how important social media are for your business. This information can be found in Google Analytics at „Acquisition“ – „Channels“.
By clicking on “Social” you get to an overview, where you can see the traffic broken down by social networks.
Behavior – Which Content are the Users from Social Media Interested in?
From this table you can deduce which social networks are generating traffic.
Next, you create a segment for each important social network and an additional segment that combines all the important social networks. With these segments you are able to analyze the behavior of the users coming from social networks. You may be curious if these users are more interested in your website (Visit Duration, Pages / Session) and if they found content they were expecting (Bounce Rate). With the Landing Pages and Exit Pages you see what content these users are most interested in.
Conversion – Is Social Media Worth It?
To see if the efforts for social media are profitable you can compare the Conversion Rate and the average order value (online shops only) with the expectations. Again, you can use the segements created earlier.
Now you subtract the costs (like purchase price for online shops, effort invested in social media, etc.) that is caused by traffic from social media and receive the net profit of traffic from social media.
Evaluation of Traffic from Social Media is Complex
With these steps you get an approximate estimate on the profitability of your social media efforts. Earnings in respect to branding and image are not considered in this analysis, since they cannot be quantified through Google Analytics.
Source: Onlinemarketing.de
