With the advent of social media, companies have invested large sums of money to have an online presence, often without clear objectives. As digital marketing continues to become an essential part of any marketing strategy, companies are now beginning to focus their efforts on setting goals and measuring results. A fundamental part of any digital campaign performance measurement is to establish indicators (KPIs). Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) give us a sense of how well our strategies and objectives have been successfully achieved.
With the KPI metrics, it is also possible to measure the return on investment (ROI) in social media. However, the truth is that the metrics vary depending on the campaign goals.
Social media seems to have removed doubts about its potential and this has really forced a change in the way advertisers and users consume ads. But even with this in mind, it is not easy to choose the right KPIs to monitor the evolution of your ads on various channels, especially if you want to link monetary values to the business.
In this article, I will cover some of the most relevant yet ignored KPIs to monitor social media presence, recruitment, retention, and engagement.
What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) serve to help companies understand how well they are working in connection with their strategic goals and objectives. In a broader sense, a KPI provides the most important performance information that lets you know if you are on the right track.
KPIs are used to reduce the complexity of a company’s performance by tracking just a small number of key indicators, in order to make the strategy more understandable. This is the same approach we use in our daily lives. A clear example:
If you visit the doctor to discuss your health, he/she uses several indicators to understand how you are, such as blood pressure, weight, height, etc. And this is how the doctor is able to analyze the complexity of the human body. I’m sure there are better examples out there, but you get the point…
Reach / Coverage
Here, the most important thing we have to measure is the “scope” of our presence. Basically, it serves to answer how many people we are reaching with our social media posts, blog articles, Twitter or Facebook messages, image views on Instagram, video views on YouTube or Vimeo, etc, etc…
This KPI is perhaps the easiest to measure. You should be able to add the opinions of the blog or email subscribers, fans and followers, views of your photos or videos wherever you have them, and any other metrics that speak to the reach of your messages.
Metrics are not accurate, but they may very well provide information to understand whether the trend is reflecting on the target audience you have defined, or whether you have to take corrective action instead.
Capture Visible ROI
To monitor recruitment through social networks you will need tags in all your messages and campaigns with values recognized by Google Analytics (or any other Web Analytics tool), to then measure their effects on the traffic they generate and your conversions. With this data, you can then optimize accordingly.
In addition, you can add a monetary reference value for the visibility of an ROI estimate, based on the average cost per visit you generate for non-organic acquisition campaigns (for example, Google Ads, affiliates, banners, Facebook ads, etc … ). That is, if your purchase cost for a visit from the other channels is 0.50 cents, you can assign this value to visits attracted to calculate the ROI of campaigns, and right after measuring the numbers of the actions you have defined as a goal.
Loyalty / Engagement
To achieve this goal, we need to measure and monitor the engagement that has taken place between the brand and users on messages in different places where you have a presence and participate.
Metrics like retweets, likes, clicks, opinions about a product, or comments on your blog are actions that should be measured to assess the level of engagement that these posts generate. You must be able to dissect your messages according to themes, types of products/services, or predefined objectives so that you can evaluate those with the greatest impact and improve what is interesting while identifying those that need a change or review.
Be sure to also consider values that don’t contribute to metrics, such as the number of negative comments or ratings, that you should subtract.
You can also consider a very specific channel metric, like Facebook, the number of users who are talking about you, that you could incorporate as engagement metrics.
For any of these three major goals, you can create a KPI to add the values of the different metrics to track at the highest level, with more granularity to go deeper, if necessary.
Every online marketing strategy must rely on web analytics, which helps us to know and measure the behavior of the user who enters your website and how your online actions are aligned with the business objectives. In all cases, the recommendation is to follow these metrics every week, without neglecting the goals.
