Improving Campaigns: Analyzing Analytics
How to understand what’s working and what’s not.
How do you know you’ve achieved a goal? Is there a proper way to measure success? In life it might be with accomplishments, raises and titles but when it comes to social media it’s analytics. Analytics are a crucial part of social media, a post is more than just a post there’s a way to measure the strategy. What is social media analytics? In sum social media analytics are a combination of data collection and data analysis, they serve as the best way to track growth. Analytics serve as a tool to be able to measure the success of campaigns, meaning if you did well what a campaign should continue and what should be improved. To better explain, it’s a better understanding of what’s working and what’s not. Know that there is always an opportunity to grow and learn.
On the other end of social media are the consumers which make up the social media. As we scroll for hours on our phone, or all the times we open up social media for a couple of seconds that add up to hours we are playing a role in analytics. Some benefits of social media analytics are the following: provide your ROI, successful social media campaigns, finding influencers for a brand/company, go against competitors, and identify trending topics.
Being able to work with tools/metrics by platform makes the marketing team’s easier and is a plus. We have all used the excuse of “not having enough time,” social media analytics tools give us the advantage to work smarter not harder. Analyzing our data and our consumers helps us come up with strategies to make the most impressions and reach for example. Interactions and engagement are happening by the second on social media.
Before analyzing data the focus should be knowing what kind of data you want to see such as awareness, sales, conversions, mentions, and more. Once you know the goal it is figuring out how to engage with your audience to meet your goal and be effective. The audience is the ones on the other end of the post that share, comment, like, and maybe even repost. If the numbers look good but you’re not meeting your goal then it didn’t make an impact in analytics and determining what went wrong would be the next steps.
There are so many different uses on social media that not all metrics will be important, if I'm posting a post about something important to spread awareness my primary metric will be between impressions and reach not so conversions that would matter in sales.
“Time and money are your scarcest resources. You want to make sure you’re allocating them in the highest-impact areas. Data reveals impact, and with data, you can bring more science to your decisions.” -Matt Trifiro, CMO at Vapor IO
Speaking on behalf of my personal experience when measuring analytics I would just look at impressions/likes since my content is personal and I'm not trying to see anything, simply the only thing that there is to measure is how many times my content was displayed.
When there is a greater purpose behind an account for examples sales, awareness or a management company the metrics analyzed would be much different. If I were to hand over a report to my immediate boss I would show impressions, reach, engagement, click-through rate, and conversions which demonstrates the effectiveness. When it comes to the monthly reporting for my company’s management team the budget is what’s most important, we want to make sure we are being effective with our budget and making the most of every penny. In this case, when it comes to reporting I would include impressions, reach, engagement, conversions, click-through rate, cost per click, cost per lead, cost per thousand impressions, and cost per view.
Remember, goals must first be determined in order to analyze social media metrics properly.
