What is the value of your organic social media marketing campaigns? It is crucial to know how to prove your social media ROI, especially if you are working towards a higher budget or a more important role.
Are you unsure of the exact number, or don’t know where to start tracking this metric. It might surprise you to learn how simple it is to measure ROI.
This guide to social media ROI will explain everything you need to know about measuring and reporting on this metric.
What is Social Media ROI?
After accounting for the costs of these resources, social media ROI (return-on-investment) measures the value of your activities on social media.
It is possible to measure ROI in many different ways, such as for a campaign or for just one post. Or for all actions taken by your team during a given time period.
Whatever the parameters, measuring social ROI is an easy way to determine the return on investment your client or business gets from social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing ROI: Why is it Important?
Marketers often measure social media metrics such as followers, impressions and comments. These metrics can be used to measure how well your brand engages customers.
However, they are not as useful in understanding the true impact your work has had. What does a social media post that has 10,000 views and a 10% engagement rate really mean to your team? And what can you do about it?
Communicate your business impact
These questions can be answered by measuring social media ROI. You can communicate the business value of your efforts by quantifying the message, comment or post on social media.
An ROI report will show stakeholders how social media activities have impacted website visitors, leads and sales. You can give campaign, channel, and post-level metrics with the right tools.
llocate resources effectively
You can plan more effective campaigns once you understand which social media activities have the greatest impact on your company.
This means that you can allocate resources to the activities that produce the greatest value.
You might discover that Instagram DMs work better for generating leads, or that LinkedIn case studies are a great way to get new signups. This knowledge will allow you to focus your resources on what works and keep adding value.
Make data-driven decisions
Social media marketing can be a complex process that requires a lot more guesswork than it is if you have data to guide your decisions. You can track ROI to identify all channels and team members that have the greatest contribution.
This data will help you make better decisions that are more likely to yield results for your company. You might be able, for example, to argue for a larger social media budget, a bonus system for your employees, or more control over your company’s marketing campaigns.
A few data points are required to calculate the social media ROI.
Profit: The value of your social media activity, in other words, how much money it generated. Investment: How much you paid for these social media activities including the cost materials, tools and contractors
These metrics can be used to calculate ROI.
Social Media ROI = Profit/Investment x 100%
Let’s say that you invest $10,000 in a social marketing campaign that generates $50,000 in new sales. Your ROI would be 500% if you use the above formula.
Are you curious about what a great social ROI looks like. It all depends. Social media ROI is affected by factors such as your industry, social channels used, funnel stage and whether paid or organic campaigns are being run.
It is important to set a benchmark for clients and your company. You can then measure your results and use data-driven methods to increase social media ROI.
Your organization should track ROI for all social media activities. This includes organic posts, ads, comments, and DMs. This will allow you to answer any questions your stakeholders may have about campaigns, channels, and engagement.
When should ROI reports be provided to stakeholders?
You can start by sharing ROI insights alongside your regular social media reports. If you provide monthly or weekly reports on organic and paid social media, this is a good time to start your ROI reporting.
If your team is interested in the whole picture, you can include quarterly and annual ROI reports. You can also share ROI insights for individual campaigns, channels, and team members by drilling down.
With one tool, you can track ROI analytics. You will need several tools if you want to improve your reporting and measure ROI for paid social media campaigns.
These tools are a great place to start.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is essential to monitor the success of your social media campaigns. Google Analytics tracks everything, from visitor numbers to acquisition channels (including social media) when you install it on your website.
Google Analytics can be used to monitor metrics such as leads and sales through social media. If your website has an online store, make sure you enable ecommerce tracking and set up ecommerce events.
Set goals for your website that correspond with the key stages of your marketing strategy if it uses Google Analytics Universal. Use the events configuration to track custom conversions if your website uses Google Analytics 4.
gorapulse
Google Analytics has a lot of data and reports that can be used to show results from many sources. These reports can be very time-consuming if you are solely interested in social media ROI.
You can track social media ROI faster if you connect your Google Analytics account with your Agorapulse Dashboard.
Agorapulse’s dashboard on ROI shows traffic and results only from social media. It filters out all other sources to help you focus your search for the right data.
Agorapulse allows you to track visitors to your website, as well as transactions and revenue generated by social media. You can easily attribute results by using the dashboard, which provides breakdowns by channel and campaign.
Bitly
Agorapulse comes with a built-in link shortener. This allows you to attribute specific actions on social media to your results. Technically, there is no additional tool required to create and organize links that can be used for tracking purposes.
If Bitly is already used by your company as a link-shortener, Agorapulse can integrate Bitly with its link tracking feature. This allows your team to continue using Bitly as a link organizing system while also automatically pulling data into Agorapulse’s ROI dashboard.
Are you curious about how this integration and workflow could look for your team members?
We’ll show you how to create and track campaign URLs.
Advertising pixels
Install relevant advertising pixels on the website of your company to track results from paid social media ads. Install the Twitter Pixel to track Twitter ads. Track clicks, conversions and results by using each social network’s advertising platform.
It is also a good idea to apply your campaign tracking strategy for any paid social campaigns that you are running. To accurately attribute your results, use the native URL parameter generator of the advertising platform.
Google Analytics allows you to dig deeper into the results once you have enabled URL tracking for paid campaigns. You can monitor mini conversions and track user behavior.
Let’s discuss how to measure and track social media ROI, starting with setting goals and ending with reporting on results.
This workflow breakdown will use two tools: Agorapulse and Google Analytics.
1. Calculate marketing investment
Start by measuring how much your company has spent on social media marketing in the time period you have chosen to measure. Your investment may include:
Subscriptions to social media marketing and content-creation toolsOutsourced content creation, and/or customer support packagesTeam member salariesAdvertising for paid social campaigns
2. Set marketing goals
Next, determine the goals you want to achieve via social media marketing. To keep your team on the right track, be as specific as possible and establish SMART goals.
Knowing the stage of your funnel is helpful. When setting goals, don’t forget to include more than the basics like increasing brand awareness and increasing eCommerce sales. Let’s say that you want 100 people to sign up to your subscription-based product for a free trial within the next 30 days.
It is easy to track signups by counting how many people visited your free trial confirmation page. You can measure conversions by setting up a goal (Google Analytics Universal), or an event (Google Analytics 4-).
It is also a good idea to create goals and events for related actions near the top of your funnel. As an example, you might want to set up goals or events that track when your target audience visits a specific webpage or downloads a lead magnet.
3. Connect Google Analytics to Agorapulse
After you have set up goals and events in Google Analytics, connect your Agorapulse account. Open your Agorapulse dashboard, and then navigate to the ROI panel. You’ll be prompted to connect an account if you haven’t done so yet.
Click the gear icon at the upper right corner if you need to connect another Google Analytics account. Select Manage Google Analytics Integration to select the accounts that you wish to connect.
4. Add campaign tracking to URLs
Now, you can start tracking the results. Agorapulse ROI Dashboard automatically displays results from all major social networks, even if campaign tracking is not added (i.e. UTM parameters).
Campaign tracking can provide deeper insight into your social media ROI.
Agorapulse allows you to add tracked URLs for posts, comments and messages.
Here’s how:
Open the publishing composer to create a new blog post. You’ll see the Untracked label in the caption box when you type in a URL. To apply tracking to a campaign that you have already created, click it or click the plus sign.
Next, enter your campaign name. Adjust the Source and Medium options if necessary. Agorapulse defaults to showing the source social network and the medium Social.
Next, choose whether to display the URL–UTM parameters along with all–in your social post or reduce it to a shorter version for a cleaner look. Agorapulse uses Pulsely for shortening links. However, Bitly is also available.
Once you click Apply, a Tracked label will appear in the caption box. Agorapulse will track your post once you publish it.
Follow the same steps to add campaign monitoring to messages and comments in your Agorapulse email inbox. You can open any comment or DM, select a saved reply, or write a reply.
You’ll see the Untracked label when you add a hyperlink. To add campaign tracking, click it. This screen allows you to create new tracking or add existing tracking. To start tracking, press Send.
You can also share these URLs with anyone outside of Agorapulse. To track influencer ROI, you can also share these URLs with brand partners.
Go to your ROI dashboard to see the results. You can set the timeframe and toggle between the goals (including eCommerce) that you have created using the dropdown menu. The ROI dashboard shows visitors, transactions and revenue for each goal.
The dashboard also shows you how your results are broken down by source (e.g., social channels) and landing page. You can also view a campaign-based breakdown if you have added campaign tracking to any comments, posts, or DMs.
You can view more details by selecting the Your social ROI tab. This tab displays data from Agorapulse content. You can also see the social profiles and content that contributed the most value.
Campaign tracking can be added to a variety content. This allows you to see which posts, comments or DMs produced the most results. This dashboard will also reveal which team members contributed the most value, which can prove your ROI.
Click the Export button at top of screen to share these charts. To account for your initial investment, you can use the social media ROI formula when you present these reports. This will allow you to accurately report your return on investment.
Social Media ROI Case Studies to Motivate Your Team
ROI analytics can have a significant impact on your bottom line, whether you are a small business or a large enterprise.
These ROI case studies show how organizations such as yours have used the data to their advantage.
A 3-D printing company was able to reduce its reporting time for social media by nearly 100% with the help of Agorapulse. It also used a meticulously organized UTM spreadsheet. The company now spends 30 minutes per month on ROI measurement and attribution, instead of spending several days. This saves over $2,500 each month. Digital Butter, a marketing agency, has adopted Agorapulse to manage its social media clients. The agency used the social media dashboard’s ROI feature to track client results and was able show that it had increased client sales 300%. This is a strong argument for the agency’s use of social media.
Want to learn more from organizations in your area? To learn more about how agencies and companies are handling the challenges of measuring social media’s business impact, download Agorapulse’s Social Media ROI Impact report.
Tracking ROI is crucial for social media managers, marketers leaders, and agency owners. You can show the value of your work and make smarter decisions to move toward greater goals by measuring social media ROI.
You can test Agorapulse’s social media ROI feature yourself. To see the feature in action, head over to your Agorapulse dashboard.
