• Google Analytics for SMM. What to watch and how to configure? What do we look at in the metric if we need traffic from social networks? Why is it necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising on social networks?

    So, you have created a Twitter profile for your company, a group on Facebook and VKontakte is also in action. You answer (are you answering?) questions from your potential customers, use scheduled publishing services to post content on social networks at the ideal time, follow your target audience on Twitter to get 8-15% of the coveted return subscriptions, thank your fans for their support.

    But beyond that, what are you doing to track the effectiveness of your social media activities and increase traffic and sales? If you engage your audience on social media, you must be able to calculate the end result. How else will you understand whether you are working in the right direction and whether your target audience wants to hear you and interact with you?

    It sounds hard, but calculating social media marketing performance metrics is easier than it seems, with metrics like engagement rate, Reach and Follower Growth, Acquisition, and associative and direct conversions ( Assisted and Direct Conversion).

    Measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing

    Engagement rate

    Let's start with the well-known engagement rate. To understand whether your content is interesting to your audience, you can track engagement metrics such as the number comments (conversation), approval or number of likes (applause), number of reposts (amplification). These metrics show the total amount of activity on your social media accounts. Do they mean anything on their own?

    Considering separately the number of likes, reposts, comments, as well as the number of subscribers, one may encounter a misleading “theater of success”, in which the growth of individual metrics (from the number of likes to the number of subscribers and registrations) is considered as an undoubted indicator of the effectiveness of marketing on social networks. In reality, these indicators, isolated from other data, do not affect anything other than the WOW effect.

    In turn, the total number of these metrics (volume) can be used to calculate more important metrics: engagement rate and (in some cases) cost of engagement.

    The engagement rate answers two main questions:

    • How relevant and interesting is the content you publish?
    • Are you communicating with the people who really want to hear from you?

    Depending on the final information you want to obtain, you can calculate your audience engagement by dividing the total number of likes, shares and comments over a certain period by the total reach, number of subscribers:

    Engagement / Overall Reach

    Calculating engagement rates based on the reach of your posts (both among subscribers and third-party audiences) is great for assessing the quality of content, but may no longer adequately reflect the situation as your reach increases significantly.

    Engagement / Followers on a specific date

    This method of calculation gives you a relatively stable indicator as a result, which allows you to assess how involved your already established audience is. By calculating it by day and presenting the results in a graph (you can monitor the changes in the SMM service KUKU.io), you can evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing recently and, by changing and supplementing it, monitor the growth or decline of engagement.

    A formula that you have probably already come across:

    The engagement rate can be calculated for paid campaigns by dividing the resulting engagement by the number of post views for a particular post, divided by the number of posts for a particular day. There are other ways depending on your goals.

    At this stage, paid social media campaigns (promotion of individual publications) can also be assessed cost of engagement (volume of engagement / funds spent). But is this assessment important if you can calculate the cost of a new subscriber who came from this campaign, as well as his conversion to the final goal - registration/purchase, etc.? Most likely, this assessment will be of interest only to the advertising agency and its clients (correct in the comments if wrong).

    The engagement rate is influenced primarily by content, which you publish, time, in which you publish, audience understanding, which you are aiming at.

    The growth in the number of subscribers also affects the final percentage of engagement, but often not in the direction you might expect. With each new subscriber, the overall profile of your audience changes, and dividing engagement by increased number of subscribers and reach, we get a smaller end result. These indicators should be considered together.

    Reach and Follower Growth

    Most companies make their presence on social networks their main goal. lead generation. But let's start from the very beginning. In order to start driving traffic from social networks to your website or making sales right away, you need (engaged) subscribers And coverage.

    Reach refers to the number of unique users who saw your content. Reach affects everything: engagement, likes, comments, clicks, feedback, engagement.

    Coverage can be like certain publication, and yours pages in general. Why is it important to separate? By publishing once a week, your post may get a lot of reach, but your page reach will be extremely low. If you post too often (say 5 times a day), the low reach of individual posts will be offset by the high reach of your page. Should we go to the extreme? Of course, it is best to find a middle ground.

    On Facebook, reach is also divided into organic(people who saw your post in their feed), viral(the user’s friends saw the post in their feed when the user commented on the post or shared it), paid(coverage of promoted posts).

    One of the trends in recent years is the rapid decline in Facebook’s organic reach. And it seems to me that the English definition of what is happening on Facebook is incredibly accurate: “pay-to-play” (“pay to play”).

    Favorite. Potential Reach. Unfortunately, the potential reach offered by social networks is beautiful numbers, divorced from reality. You can post super-viral event content, but you won't come close to the impressive numbers that social media touts for you. Your audience growth and engagement metrics, while not as glamorous, are a more realistic measure of your potential reach.

    To assess potential coverage outside of your subscribers and increasing your audience you can start by counting the number of friends of your engaged followers, the audience estimate of your competitors, and the count of engaged users who are not yet your followers. Reinforce the information received by segmenting users by involvement and geography, compare the portraits of old subscribers and new ones.

    By identifying and studying the main groups you need to influence, you can independently evaluate your potential reach and create your own truly effective list of growth hacks for social networks.

    Attracting clients (Acquisition)

    Despite the fact that user traffic from social networks in most cases is significantly inferior to organic traffic from search engines, the percentage of repeat visits from social networks is several times higher than Google’s indicators. You can check this in Google Analytics right now.

    When talking about attracting users from social networks, it’s impossible not to start with frequency of transitions to your site. The metric divides visits to your site into two main categories: new And repeated. While repeat clicks reflect the effectiveness of your social media content and audience engagement, new clicks show whether by increasing your “reach” you are actually getting more clicks.

    What can influence user acquisition from social networks? Of course, first of all, this content, which you publish, and then, how do you interact with your audience.

    Among the many strategies for increasing conversions from social networks, I find especially interesting:

    Twitter.

    Participate in Twitter chats. Twitter chats are a great way to interact with a large number of people at once who are (or might be) interested in your product. The more you participate in Twitter chats, the more you will be recognized. Also you can use chats to promote your blog articles, relevant to the chat topic. you can find a large list of popular chat rooms.

    Influence on opinion leaders. Identify influential people in your industry and people who frequently mention keywords you're interested in and add them to private Twitter lists. Contact 2-3 people on your list per day. In this case, the tweets do not necessarily have to be related to your brand and can cover related topics. If you still want to post links to your site without looking like a spammer, try linking to useful content on your blog.

    Facebook and Vkontakte.

    80% of users social media prefer to communicate with brands through Facebook and VKontakte. Why? Because it's faster than via email. 50% expect to receive support on social media, and only 23% of brands with a social media presence actually provide it. You've probably heard that the experience of poor support spreads very quickly. But fortunately, positive experiences spread very quickly, too, word of mouth works. Users want to communicate with you through social networks, so give them this opportunity.

    For LinkedIn the main attraction strategies can be searching and meeting influential people, participation in group discussions, repost your blog articles etc..

    All social media engagement strategies are truly worthy of their own column. But I would like to return to evaluating effectiveness. Will you take the quality of the relationships being built as a criterion? No. When talking about efficiency and ROI, you compare money and time spent with specific goals achieved.

    Because any relationship built with an audience on social networks is useless without conversion. So if you decide to measure referral traffic from social networks, take it a step further and measure the final conversion in registration or purchase.

    Direct and associated conversion (Conversion)

    Let's start this block with the four main ways social media users can come to your website:

    1. Social network > Direct link to the site
    2. Social network > Blog article with a link to the main page > Lead
    3. Social network > Gated content (in order to get to an article or download something, you need to log in or leave information about yourself) > Lead
    4. Social network > Blog article > Registration form posted on the blog

    The paths are different and not all will instantly lead to the desired effect - registration, sale, etc.. Before attracting users to your site and making them return, you must clearly define your end goal: what kind of conversion do you want to see into sales or other desired actions?

    At the same time, you need to decide for yourself that transitions and conversion will not be achieved solely by selling posts, because constantly posting such content is the surest way to lose your audience.

    Begin You can calculate conversion from the last click, clicks from social networks via your links, attaching UTM tags to them. But direct clicks don't tell the full story of how effectively you're building relationships and creating a loyal audience for your brand on social media.

    Most of your posts and tweets won't get you a sale, but you can close your target with potential customers who visit your site again. At this moment there appear Google Analytics Assisted Conversions:

    Assisted conversions occur when a user visits your site, then leaves without converting, but then returns and completes the conversion. The higher these values, the more contribution the social network makes.

    By comparing Assisted Conversions to Google Analytics Last Click Conversions, you can determine which social networks are ideal for maintaining relationships with existing customers and which ones are ideal for generating and generating new business.

    So, when you know and are able to calculate these indicators, the activity of your subscribers on social networks ceases to be an ephemeral indicator of effectiveness, the “theater of success”, and becomes the basis for calculating engagement and ROI, assessing the quality of incoming traffic, as well as the effectiveness of your content marketing.

    26.01.2018

    If you've been using the same social media strategies for several years, it may be time to take stock of your goals and make sure your social media tactics are increasing conversion rates, increasing brand awareness and attracting new customers.

    1. Double the number of videos on your channels (if you aren't already)

    Let's face it: Internet users are addicted to video, and that's great for publishers and marketers.

    On average, Facebook users consume 100 million hours of video every day. About 82% of Twitter users watch videos on this particular medium. Marketers are also seeing positive results with LinkedIn Video, which was introduced last August.

    If you want to increase your social media conversion rate, double down on the channels that are already working for you. For example, if you see more engagement on Twitter than on LinkedIn, it's a good idea to focus your efforts on Twitter.

    2. Use smart, conversion-focused social sharing buttons

    Today's social media user expects your service to be timely and responsive, even when it comes to customer support. Why not give them what they want? Send personalized and timely responses, even if it's just a simple customer support tip.


    Let's be honest: we've all been on social networks for a long time. If your old routine isn't getting you anywhere, it may be time to change tactics that will speed up conversions and even sales. On January 30, we will hold an event at which 4 leading experts will tell you what you need to do to

    Video advertising is primarily a media tool that works best at the upper stages of the user acquisition funnel. A creative video attracts attention and helps introduce people to the product or maintain the image component.

    But video creatives can also be used to solve performance problems. We'll talk about this today.

    Let's take a closer look at In-feed placement; it is this that often gives the best return on investment ratio. And there are a number of reasons for this:

    VKontakte

    In-feed video advertising on VKontakte is presented in the form of “Universal Recording” and “Site Advertising” formats. If you use these formats, your ad will look like a feed post. Posting in a feed has several advantages:

    • nativeness;
    • ability to add a lot of text;
    • engagement: people notice and respond well to ads in the feed.

    If you use the “Universal Post” format, you create a separate post that has all the restrictions of regular posts, and when you click on the ad, the user is added to your group on VKontakte. You can also add a video to your post, but it won't play automatically. A link to the site must be added separately inside the post, or you can use a block with a button that will lead to the site.

    • title (up to 25 characters);
    • description (up to 90 characters);
    • image or video (video will automatically play without sound).

    Clicking on a post or action button will take the user directly to the site (as opposed to a generic post).

    How to Create Conversion Videos

    If you want to create a video, you have four main options:

    • Contact an advertising agency. The result will be of high quality, but you will have to pay well for it.
    • Order a video from a freelancer. It's cheaper, but the results may not be as impressive.
    • Make the video yourself. An acceptable option if you are ready to come up with a script, organize filming and edit the video yourself. In a word, it all depends on your capabilities.
    • Make a creative slideshow. This is the simplest option of all; you need to prepare the slides and arrange them in a video editor.
    • Be sure to add a call to action.
    • Include a detailed description of your USP in the video.
    • Add subtitles so that you can understand the video even without sound, since by default the video plays without it.
    • The first five seconds of the video should be as exciting and attention-grabbing as possible. This is necessary to distract a person from watching the feed and switch their attention to the video.
    • You should not make a video longer than 15 seconds. Ideally, no more than 6 seconds. The rate of content consumption is constantly growing; modern users are not ready to waste their time on videos that are too long.
    Read more: