A Complete Guide on Measuring ROI of Social Media Campaigns with Google Analytics

You spend couple of thousands on boosting that post on Facebook, rack your brains for creating engaging posts for your fans, participate in groups on Facebook and chase followers on twitter. Still when asked about social ROI you don’t have much to report beyond likes, followers and talking about us. Social Media activities have an ROI, and through this post I hope to share some simple ways to measure the ROI of your social media campaigns.

First things first – Get access to Google Analytics of Your Website. While there is Facebook insights and some tools to measure social mentions of your brand, there is a lot more you can do with website Analytics.

1.  How much traffic do you drive to your website via social channel?

You simply need to login to Google Analytics & Follow the steps highlighted in the image.

Using the date setting, You can see data from different months & also use the trend charts in Google analytics to compare traffic on daily/weekly or monthly basis. You can also use this trend to see how traffic behaves in different days of the week, during events and festivals etc.

The best way to measure the impact of specific campaigns would be to use custom urls for your ads/posts. This will enable you to drill down to the specific campaigns or posts in Google Analytics. Say daily you make 2 different types of website url posts on Facebook – one blog post & one product post. Using custom urls you will be able to see which post is driving more visitors to your website.

2.  The quality of traffic you drive to your website via social channel?

Now it’s very important to go beyond the number of visitors you draw to the site. You maybe boosting posts on Facebook or running Fb ad campaigns to promote a product, creating boards on Pinterest or simply engaging with your followers on twitter. But is it all worth it?

Let me share a small scenario we came across during a social media campaign. We used a combination of Google ads, Facebook ads and email marketing to seed our campaign. Now the CPC (Cost per click, also equal to cost per visit on campaign page) for Google was twice as much as Facebook. One would think why not shift the entire ad budget to Facebook. But when we looked beyond visits and factors in the Bounce Rate, time on Site & avg Pages per visit from Google and Facebook – we saw that Google ads was giving us better quality of users. In-fact Facebook was giving us users that spent hardly 18 secs on the page.

I guess you see the point now. By simply looking at visitors & visitor data, you can know which social media channels or campaigns are driving more relevant traffic to your website.

3.  Create specific goals & events to track you campaign ROI

There is a reason why we want to drive traffic to our websites. It could be getting more registered users, generating enquiries or leads (prospective buyers of our product or service), selling products (as in most e-commerce businesses) etc. Although social media marketing is a source of user engagement and brand building for most brands, it also has an impact on the goals I mentioned above.

If there are already some goals set for your website – User registrations/Leads/Buys, you simply need to select these goals to see the conversion coming from that channel.

If there are no goals or you would like to create a new goal for say a contest on your website, which requires users to submit an entry. You can create a goal or an event in Google analytics to measure which channel is giving you maximum conversion. The steps to create a goal/event are explained in detail here.

Here’s a simple way to figure out if its goal or an event you need to create - If your page URL changes after users submit their entry, you should create a goal. If the URL doesn’t change and you want to measure say a video-play or click of a button – you need to create an event first.

5.  Measure How Social Media Drives Overall Conversions

Your users interact with your brand not just through social media but through multiple other channels.  Let’s consider a user who registered on an e-commerce website after viewing an Ad. Few days later, he clicks on a post he sees in his newsfeed and starts exploring their products. Sometime later he clicks on an offer he got in his email to finally buy something from the online store. About the Ad, the newsfeed post on Facebook and the email are the 3 channels the user interacted with before deciding to make a purchase from the online store. In above case, even though email was the final source which led him to buy, the Ad and Facebook post assisted this conversion.

Earlier Google analytics would give the credit for conversion only to the last touch-point with the user (email in the above example) but now it helps us track the impact of multiple channels on conversion through Multichannel Funnels Report (under Conversions Section).

To specifically see the impact of your social media campaigns, select Social & Other Channels to see what is the overlap in the channels. You should look at ways to improve/increase interaction of your users on social media. Make sure the social media handles on your site are easily available to the users, if possible provide them some incentives (emotional or offers) to follow you on social media.

The Assisted Conversions tab shows how many conversions were assisted by social media. You can also view the multi-channel grouping path which can give you the exact order in which the users interacted with your brand on each channel.

You can also explore the top conversion path section to visualize the exact path via which users interact with your website.

As marketers we spend both time & resources on social media but often don’t attach metrics to social media campaigns. The above methods will not only help you measure ROI of your existing campaigns but will also help you improvise on your overall social media strategy.