Measurement is the proof of the pudding, when it comes to social media. The Digital Marketing team at iVista always mentions that it seeks to deliver real business benefits to clients; but how do you measure those benefits?
Google Analytics let you track a number of streams of data; with the right tweaking you can relate these to business goals and get an ongoing dashboard view of your progress. Once you set your goals for visitors to your site or profile, you can link these to your Analytics. These goals could include:
- Making a purchase
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Following your social media accounts
- Requesting a quote/sales call
With the right analytics in place, you can see how different elements contribute to this goal; you can also measure what factors go with a failure to achieve these goals. Some of the kinds of goals you can set are:
Pages to visit: You can track hits to a URL destination. You can also add funnel steps to see how well your PPC or social seeding is leading traffic to your chosen landing page.
Time spent: You can track the visit duration of each user, tracking visits in different bands to see what made people stay and what made them leave.
Visits to a page: Let’s say you have a landing page that you are directing hits through via a campaign; you can set your goal for the number of visits you want and then compare it with actual traffic.
Event: You can set up an event such as a purchase and assign a desired number of times it needs to occur; this is your goal. This makes it easy to track progress towards your goals.
As you drill deeper into Google Analytics, you’ll find more and more ways to track goals around specific URLs and e-commerce objectives. The better you factor goals into your reporting, the more transparent it becomes. Needless to say our team at i-Vista produces goal-oriented metrics like the ones discussed in this post for every project we undertake!
