The value of social media reporting lies deeper than just reporting on total engagement results. With new updates and innovations evolving how social marketing is shaped, its crucial to improve on insights, while continuing to expand on answering the ‘why’ ‘what’ ‘how’ and ‘who.’ Reaching a specific goal is great, but answering how this result was achieved allows for successful application of structure and tactics to future campaigns. How media spend is tied to engagement as a result becomes influential to monetize social media success. Quantifying how certain social channels performed is key, and understanding how actions affect customer behavior leads to effective development of attribution modeling.
Breakdown of Raw Data
Each social channel is supplied with numerous metrics measuring overall performance. Identify the metrics that are relevant to your brand and align with your goals first. From here, start to breakdown the results, the highs, the lows, the averages, % changes, etc.
Align Campaigns, Events, Promotions with Trends
Depending on your strategy for review, align campaigns, events, and promotions you’ve applied, with identified trends. This focuses on identifying the ‘how’ part — how you were able to derive the presented results. If you’ve tested new features as part of your social channel, for example, focus on trend views and results that provide you with good insight into whether or not what you applied worked. Trial and error.
Apply Attribution Modeling
Start to test which marketing interactions with audiences and customers, result with conversions and sales. Analyze the type of interaction, timing and action taken. Measuring the ROI for each channel is a vital component, providing real value to the actions taken place.
Type of Attribution Models via Google Analytics
Last Interaction, Last Non-Direct Click, Last AdWords Click, First Interaction, Linear, Time-Decay, Position Based, or custom model (with applied rules).
To gain greater insight into the effectiveness of your social channels apply attribution models that line up with your overarching marketing goals. As reflected by the features via Google Analytics, it important to ‘test your assumptions’ through experimentation of what models work. Depending on the output achieved via the applied model, it is important to go back and refine, to ensure results are truly reflective of the social initiatives implemented.
Understand Competitors
Although this may seem an obvious step to include, it’s vital to apply comparison views with your competitors. How successful were their channels and identified campaigns? Any clear outliers? Are there any missed opportunities? Understanding where you stand comparatively month to month and quarter over quarter, gives you a deeper look into areas of improvement and current success factors.
Comparable View
Finally, be able to compare your results for weekly, monthly and quarterly analysis. Make sure that your results make sense and allow for reflection of input.
Additions & Feedback
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