Pittsburgh Social Media Marketing Campaign Strategies

The first 3 posts in this series:

• Planning Your Social Media Campaign
• Analyzing Your Social Media Campaign
• Implementing Your Social Media Campaign

have showed how to plan your social media campaign, analyze the social media market, and implement a social media campaign. Now it’s time to look at measurement of your efforts to determine your campaigns effects on Traffic, SEO, and Reach.

Measurement statistics or analytics, as they are referred to, provide a way to judge how effective your campaigns are to date. Analytics can provide valuable insight into strengths and weaknesses of your social media campaigns and sniff out opportunities that you may have to promote your campaigns and your business.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MIX – ANALYTICS

All websites and blogs should have some form of Analytics. The screenshot above is from a Twitter analytics tool called Twitalyzer. Measuring your success in the Social Media arena is very important. There are many great social media platforms to choose from; as mentioned in the previous posts in this series. Measuring your traffic on your website or blog can be done with a simple hit counter. Other more involved statistics can be done by implementing Google Analytics or AWstats.

Here is a great article to show you how involved statistics can be and how much they can cost. (see comments) Having said that there are loads of free tools that you can utilize to measure your social success in the marketing arena for free.

A great free tool for you to benchmark where you are at any time is http://www.socialmention.com/. This is very powerful and provides you with a number of options for finding your content and reach. Of course if you are yet to start your campaign then it can give you an idea of how competitive the social media landscape has become for your terms.

Another free tool we really like is http://www.howsociable.com . This tool generates scores based on your level of involvement in dozens of social media sites. It is no frills, no login, and generates a nice idea of how well your campaign is progressing.

Just remember that analytics are only a barometer of how well your doing. The true measure of your success is always conversions. Need help with your Pittsburgh Social Media Marketing campaigns? Contact Blackball Online Marketing for a free analysis.

Pittsburgh Online Marketing –Improving Methods of Measuring ROI

Develop a Clear Pittsburgh Online Marketing Message

When it comes to measuring your ROI from your website or PPC advertisements most businesses rely on analytics, however these are only one form of measurement.

If your goal is to convert sales via incoming phone calls directly generated through a website or PPC ad and you get 10,000 clicks per day to your site and no calls, how good is this metric as a measure of ROI? It’s almost worthless, but it’s a starting point. Everybody has heard of the phrase “statistics can be misleading”, this is a case in point when it comes to using analytics solely in regards to ROI.

Analytics can show a lot about your visitors.  They are a fine measure of how web traffic arrives to your site, what geographical locations visitors are viewing from, what their patterns are for finding your site, how they behave when navigating your site, and where they leave from. Analytics can also measure other metrics, but for final sale rates generated from your site or ads they are only half the measure.

Let’s use the same client from above for an example. Let’s say this client sells 100 units during this day. This would lead us to believe that our Conversion Rate is 1 in 100 or 10,000 clicks/ 100 sales. However, how many calls does our client have to take to get those 100 sales? I suspect it’s more than just 100. We need to measure clicks / calls and then calls / sales.

Let’s not forget that business does not exist in a vacuum like the analytics used to measure it. Most businesses have a Marketing Mix which is far more diverse. Social Media Campaigns, Print Advertising, other Online Marketing listings, word of mouth, and customer Brand Recognition awareness also play a part.

The need for business to measure the effectiveness of Social Media Marketing campaigns, Website traffic, and PPC conversion rates to justify continuation of Online Marketing Campaigns is impossible to quantify by analytics alone. If a company is looking to quantify sales we must look beyond analytics.

Conversion Tracking and Return on investment (ROI)

The following statement comes directly from Google Adwords Help, “ROI is the ratio of your costs to your profits. It's typically the most important metric for advertisers because it is based on your specific advertising goals and shows the real effect your advertising efforts have on your business. ROI revolves around conversions: customer actions that you deem valuable such as a purchase, sign-up, webpage visit, or lead.”

This is all well and good and provides further data for an effective lead generation stream but it has to go further if ROI is to be measured from it. We need a conversion rate for our conversion rates generated by the analytics and the Conversion Tracking we now use and a better way to measure them. Sales are the only way to measure return rates in the traditional sense. Without sales there is no ROI.

Blackball Online Marketing specializes in all forms of Internet Marketing and Website Promotion. We handle Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google Maps listings for Local Search Marketing, Social Media Marketing Campaigns as well as managing many traditional media delivery methods. Call us at (412) 377-7280 to discuss your Pittsburgh Online Marketing needs.