Chapter 13: Tracking the KPIs of Social Media
Editor's Note: This post was originally published on The Moz Blog in September of 2011. While marketers still struggle to measure the impact social marketing activities have on the bottom line, the gap between social and ROI is narrowing. This progress can be attributed in part to the increased sophistication of many of the social media management and analytics tools mentioned in this post—including Followerwonk, which was acquired by Moz last summer.
Social media receives a massive amount of attention on the web and attracts a great deal of interest from marketers, too. The primary complaint of those who invest in it seems to be consistent: It's hard to measure the impact on the bottom line. On this point, I must concede. While social is an exciting new area for online marketers, its value isn't always commensurate with the effort required. Even when it is, it's tough to prove that point to clients or executives.
This chapter is here to help you improve your ability to track the impact of your social media actions. In it, I take a brief look at the topics surrounding this problem, and offer some solutions, tools, and methodologies to make things easier.
Why and Where Social Matters
Social media has an analytics problem. Whereas many other sources—ads, organic search, referrals, bookmarks—drive traffic that directly converts into a desired action (such as a purchase or signup), social traffic is temporal. Visitors from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, and the like are known to visit a page and quickly depart. This leaves marketers struggling to understand the value of these channels. High bounce rates, low browse rates, and awful conversion rates make social the black sheep of referral traffic sources.
I'll try to explain the analytics problem—and the reason why social still matters despite its poor KPIs—in visual form.
Web users rarely become buyers (or “conversion action” takers of any kind) on their first visit to a website. The web's a tool for discovery, research and investigation, and people use it that way. They browse around the web, find things that are interesting, discover potential needs or desires, further examine the options, and eventually make a purchase decision.
For most people, the web is less like the checkout aisle at the grocery store (stocked with tempting treats and not-so-tempting magazines, at least IMO), and more like the considered purchase of a grill, television set, or automobile. Social media isn't the deal closer—it's the channel that creates potential for a future conversion. Social media can create brand familiarity and drive visitors to content that further draws them in, but it rarely fills an expressly stated need.
The figure on the facing page shows the various roles of social for a visitor who took a free trial of Moz software in 2011 and was converted.
Twitter and Facebook are involved early on in the buying cycle, likely before a customer has knowledge about the product or realizes their need for it. Social channels are likely to be partially responsible for thousands of free trials at Moz. Given the social analytics tools currently available, we have a very tough time quantifying just how much value social participation and presence bring to our company.
Another great illustration of this phenomenon is Eloqua's Content Grid, which explores how the types of content shared through various channels (including social media) impact the buying process (see http://blog.eloqua.com/the-content-grid-v2).
Social media does lots of good things for brands on the web:
• Drives traffic
• Builds brand familiarity
• Creates positive associations with the brand
• Delivers social proof (built when people share content and discuss the brand)
• Attracts brand followers, including brand evangelists, who help spread the word about products and services
The Atlantic published an insightful article about why good advertising works at http://mz.cm/ZYsMiA. Many of the same principles that apply to good advertising apply to social media. In my opinion, they are even more powerful because they're not interruption-based, but inbound and organic. If ten of the people I follow on Twitter or Google+ start sharing links to a new startup's website, I'm going to be far more engaged, impressed, and enticed to make a purchase than if that same startup puts banner ads on the websites I browse. Both channels create brand awareness, but social is more personal, more trustworthy, and more likely to capture my click.
We know that social is a softer, more-difficult-to-measure traffic source, but we're inbound marketers. That means we can't live without data, so let's explore some of the ways we can monitor this channel.
Which Social Metrics to Track
In the social media analytics world, there are several key types of metrics we're interested in tracking:
• Traffic data—How many visits and visitors did social drive to our sites?
• Fan/follower data—How many people are in our networks, and how are our networks growing?
• Social interaction data—How are people interacting with, sharing, and re-sharing our content on social networks?
• Social content performance—How is the content we're producing on social sites performing?
Getting the right metrics to answer these questions requires segmenting data by network.
Facebook Insights, the social network's built-in analytics product for brand pages, offers a wealth of data for nearly all the metrics we care about (see www.facebook.com/insights).
As these images show, you can track key metrics over time with Insights, including the size and demographics of your fan base, the reach and effectiveness of your content, and the quantity of likes and content shares.
Insights also offers a unique, powerful feature—integration with your website. Using a snippet of JavaScript code, you can embed the Facebook Insights functionality on your site. This gives you information about all the users who visit your pages while logged into Facebook. Since Facebook Insights is a topic that has been well-covered on Moz (and elsewhere on the web), I won't dwell too much on it other than to say it's the most robust built-in social analytics platform by far.
To learn more about Facebook Insights, check out these resources:
• Official Facebook Insights Page for Developers https://developers.facebook.com/docs/insights
• “4 Facebook Marketing Tactics You Might Not Know About,” Moz www.moz.com/blog/4-facebook-marketing-tactics-you-might-not-know-about
• “6 Areas You Need to Monitor for Effective Messaging,” Search Engine Watch http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2097426/Facebook-Insights-6-Areas-You-Need-to-Monitor-for-Effective-Messaging
Twitter and Facebook likely refer more traffic to websites than other social networks do. (StumbleUpon purportedly sends more outbound traffic, but it is more of a discovery/browsing engine than a true social network.) Unlike Facebook, Twitter does not have a relatively sophisticated analytics product built into its platform. This means that you need third-party tools (or a lot of time to collect data manually) to track metrics for Twitter over time, as I discuss later in this chapter.
The metrics I care about tracking on Twitter are:
• Followers—The unique number of Twitter users who've “followed” my account.
• Active Followers—The number of followers who've logged into Twitter in the past 30 days. This data is challenging to get, and requires software that runs through your followers and determines which ones are actively using Twitter via the API. Some third-party tools (discussed later) show this information.
• @ Replies—The number of tweets sent that begin with my account name (Twitter handle), @randfish.
• @ Mentions—The number of tweets that include my Twitter handle inside the tweet. Anyone who follows me will see these tweets in their feed, regardless of whether they follow the people who tweet about me.
• Brand Mentions—The number of tweets that mention a brand but do not use the twitter handle preceded by the @ symbol.
• Domain/URL Mentions—The number of tweets that include a link containing my domain name. These now include, by default, any shortened URL that contains domain name, as Twitter automatically parses the final destination URL for matches to the query.
• Direct Retweets—The quantity of my tweets that my followers share with their followers using Twitter's native retweet (RT) button. These tweets are unedited by those who share them.
• Other RTs—The quantity of my tweets that my followers shared with their followers using a method other than Twitter's native retweet button. These tweets credit me by preceding my Twitter handle with the abbreviation “RT” or word “via.” They are similar to direct retweets, but contain a modification of the original message. Because of this, they appear to come from a unique source, and aren't necessarily counted by Twitter's automatic RT system.
• Best Performing Content—The content I made available to Twitter that earned the most clicks, retweets, and shares. Twitter does not currently make this information directly available. However, it can be obtained through some third-party tools like Buffer (http://bufferapp.com), TweetReach (http://tweetreach.com), and Twenty Feet (https://www.twentyfeet.com).
• Direct Traffic and Non-Twitter.com Drivers—The sources that sent traffic to my site via Twitter's ecosystem, including desktop clients and other third-party applications. Thanks to a recent change made by Twitter, these sources now show up (for the most part) as coming from http://t.co (Twitter's native URL shortener).
In addition to these relatively standard metrics, I'd love to be able to see how my Twitter activities impact follower count, engagement, etc. For example, if one of my tweets earns me 100 new followers, it would be terrific to see that growth. However, it currently isn't possible to make these types of connections (to my knowledge).
All these metrics show the growth, reach, and traffic-level impact of my Twitter activities, but none of them fully integrate with the buying cycle mentioned earlier. In an ideal world, I'd want to see the bottom-line impact that all of my Twitter activities have, but this is very challenging to achieve.
It's often mentioned that in analytics, nothing is worth tracking unless it leads to actions that improve performance. For the metrics listed in this section, the primary actions you're tracking are your own. The key to improving performance is to compare successful interactions, tweets, and content against less successful ones. This will help you determine what actions grow your audience, bring visits to your site, and eventually, drive conversion actions.
Author's Note: For more information about tracking Twitter metrics, see “Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics” by Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytics' evangelist (www.kaushik.net/avinash/social-media-analytics-twitter-quantitative-qualitative-analysis).
LinkedIn functions like a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. Making a personal connection on LinkedIn require mutual acceptance from both parties. Public entities like company pages and groups, though, can be followed one-way. LinkedIn tends to be a great social network for those who are recruiting talent, or are involved in B2B sales and marketing. This particular social network is far less effective as a pure consumer/B2B channel.
Like Facebook, LinkedIn has some built-in analytics for businesses—and individuals, too. Some data points that are useful to track include:
• Company Page Views and Uniques—The number of times your company's LinkedIn profile has been viewed over time and the quantity of unique visitors to the page.
• Quantity of Followers—As with Twitter, individuals can “follow” a brand account on LinkedIn and receive status updates in their “updates” stream. The more followers you have, the greater your ability to reach people on LinkedIn with your content.
• Connections—The number of unique connections an individual has on LinkedIn is a worthwhile metric to track. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't find built-in functionality for tracking that data, just the raw, current count (on the “Network Statistics Page”) and some data about the geographic and industry reach of those connections.
• Messages and Invitations—The number of invitations to connect and email messages sent to your account. (I clearly need to find a free hour or two and comb through mine—sorry if I haven't added you yet.) This data is also excluded from LinkedIn's built-in analytics.
• Profile Views—The number of people who have looked at your profile over time. Tracking some data about who they are might also be useful. (Note: If someone who views your profile is a first degree connection, LinkedIn will show their name; if not, they'll display the company name or industry associated with their profile.)
• Top Keywords—The top keywords LinkedIn users searched for prior to discovering your profile.
• Content Shares—Tragically, I couldn't find a way to measure or record the number of status updates and shares to one's personal LinkedIn feed, nor the number of “likes” received for them. While LinkedIn has not added this functionality for engagement with personal profiles, they do offer limited analytics data for Company Pages that they can use to track engagement with their company status updates (i.e., content shared).
• Traffic—While LinkedIn isn't a huge driver of referral traffic for most users, it can be for certain B2B sites. For these sites, the quality of the traffic from LinkedIn is often higher than traffic from other social sources.
Over the past month, LinkedIn has been Moz's fourth largest source of referral traffic; not too shabby! (Note: Referrals from moz.com and pro.moz.com are technically internal referrers.)
Few third-party tools exist to help with measuring the success of LinkedIn activities. Over time, though, I hope to see more tools in the social media analytics field developed that successfully track actionable data for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and beyond.
Google+
Google's social network is still relatively young. Given Google's intent to make it part of the signals that influence web search rankings, and the dramatic growth (25 million+ members) it achieved in its first two months, it's already worthy of marketers' attention.
Unfortunately, the network doesn't yet have any sophisticated metrics-tracking capabilities, very few third-party apps have integrated Google+, and robust API and oAuth functionality isn't currently available. There are plenty of interesting metrics worth tracking. It's just insanely frustrating that even raw counts are unavailable for many of these. Hopefully, Google will add some soon. (Heck, if you work on the Google+ team and are doing analytics for users/brands, please consider the following list.)
• Number of Followers—It is at least possible to manually track this. Technically, on Google+, people who subscribe to your updates aren't called “followers.” They “have you in circles.” You can see this metric on your profile page.
• +Name Mentions—It's tough to even manually compile a list of name mentions. Unfortunately, I could not find a raw quantity of name mentions on Google+, either, making it nearly impossible (and certainly not pragmatic) to track the number of name mentions you receive on Google+ today.
• Brand Mentions—I'm unaware of any way to find the number of brand mentions in Google+; another bummer. However, you can use Google's “site:plus.google.com” search modifier and query for your brand name with date restrictions to produce a list of brand mentions in the SERPs (see http://mz.cm/ZEtBNq).
• Content Shares, Content +1s, Link Shares, & Link +1s—These would all be excellent metrics to add to our list, but we currently have no way to extract this data from Google+ system (to my knowledge, anyway).
• +1s of Your Site's Content—While this number is currently unavailable in Google+, it is possible to track it via Google's Webmaster Tools (www.google.com/webmasters). Webmaster Tools provides the quantity of +1s of your site's content, as well as where they came from and where they point to, allowing you to analyze their impact.
• Traffic—Google+ is already a traffic powerhouse for many tech-forward brands and those that reach early adopters in general, especially considering their relatively small market share (one-eighth the size of Twitter based on total number of users, probably even smaller when comparing active number of users). For the record, Google+ has been the ninth-largest referrer of visits to Moz over the past 30 days.
Perhaps due to privacy issues, Google+ uses a single referring URL for all traffic. This helps consolidate traffic from Google+ in analytics reports, but makes it frustrating to determine the value of actions taken on the social network beyond driving traffic.
For more information about tracking Google+ metrics, see these articles:
• “Google Explores Re-Ranking Search Results Using +1 Button Data,” Wired.com www.wired.com/business/2011/08/google-studying-re-ranking-search-results-using-1-button-data-but-its-touchy
• “Google+ Hits 25 Million Users, is the Fastest Growing Website Ever,” Business Insider www.businessinsider.com/google-plus-growth-25-million-users-2011-8
Reddit, StumbleUpon, Quora, Yelp, Flickr, and YouTube
Depending on the quantity and value of the traffic that other social networks send, there may indeed be additional metrics worth tracking. StumbleUpon, SlideShare, Reddit, and Quora are all in our top 50 referrers for Moz, and each sends 500+ visits per month. Investing more effort in analyzing data from these social networks is likely worth it, and if this yields large returns, additional investment is likely warranted.
Blogs and Forums
The world of social started out as one where discussion sites (forums, Q&A, bulletin boards, and the like) and the blogosphere reigned supreme. Eventually, consolidation and massive adoption of the major networks took over the hearts and minds of the press. The social web, however, is still very much alive in the blogosphere and forum world.
Marketers have massive opportunities available to them in these spaces, too. At Moz, we have tens of thousands of visits each week from blogs and discussion sites of all sizes. Interaction with those sources often yields fantastic results in terms of referral traffic, mindshare, and links. Many brands use similar tactics, hiring community managers or evangelists to engage in industry topic discussions while building strong, recognizable profiles that increase brand awareness and produce traffic and links.
Thus, as responsible inbound marketers, it's our job to measure actions taken through these channels, and to quantify the impact each one has on our brand.
• Site & Brand Mentions—Monitoring mentions of a site or brand name (such as Moz or www.moz.com) in the blogosphere can lead you to content and conversations worthy of engagement, as well as allow you to track the quantities (and possibly sentiment) of those mentions over time. Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) is potentially worth looking at as a tool to help you monitor these mentions.
• Links—Direct links are nice because they appear either in link-tracking tools like Google Webmaster Tools (www.google.com/webmasters), Open Site Explorer (www.opensiteexplorer.org), or Majestic SEO (www.majesticseo.com), OR directly in your web analytics. Note new referral sources (quantity and location) and apply metrics. (I like Domain Authority personally, but am biased, of course.)
• Traffic—A must-have for any inbound channel, visit-tracking is the most simple metric I've mentioned here. (Honestly, though, I wish it could be tracked alongside the quantitative metrics for mentions/links and stats like follow versus nofollow/ DA/ # of linking root domains/etc. to help give a sense of the SEO value, too.)
For any inbound marketing channel (social or otherwise) that you're considering tracking, I really like this process:
Losing a few hours to channels that don't provide value is a minimal cost to pay for discovering and participating in those that do!
If you're curious about this process and want to dive deeper, you may be interested in viewing my SlideShare presentation, The Power of Inbound Marketing (www.slideshare.net/randfish/the-power-of-inbound-marketing).
Tools for Measuring Social Media Metrics
The number of tools available to track social media has grown exponentially over the last three years. While I'm unable to list all of them here, this list will hopefully provide you with a good sample set:
• bit.ly—Excellent for tracking click-throughs on content from any source—on any device or medium. It's frustrating to have an extra layer of analytics required. Given the non-reporting of many desktop and mobile clients, though, bit.ly (https://bitly.com) has become a must for those seeking accurate analytics on the pages they share.
• Social Mention—The equivalent of “Google Alerts” for social media, Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) has real-time brand monitoring, search functionality, and several plugins.
• Raven Tools—A toolset that tracks basic metrics for both search and social, Raven (http://raventools.com/tools) pulls data from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and will likely expand into other networks in the near future.
• Converseon—A very impressive social and web-monitoring tool out of NYC, Converseon (http://converseon.com), like Radian6, is geared toward enterprises, but offers human-reviewed sentiment classification and analysis. This is a very powerful tool for those seeking insight into brand perception on the social web.
• PageLever—Specifically focused on tracking interactions on Facebook pages, PageLever (http://pagelever.com) provide more depth and data than Insights does.
• Twitter Counter—A phenomenal tool for monitoring the growth of Twitter accounts over time, Twitter Counter (http://twittercounter.com) tracks data latently. This makes it possible for you to access historical data for many accounts, even if you haven't used Twitter Counter before. Upgrading to a “premium” account provides analytics on mentions and retweets as well.
• Followerwonk—Technically more of a social discovery tool, Followerwonk (https://followerwonk.com) helps you find profiles that meet your specific criteria. It also offers very cool analytics on follower overlap and opportunity, and is based on a paid credits model. (Note: Followerwonk was acquired by Moz in 2012, and is now available to PRO members with added functionality.)
• Social Bakers—While it provides basic stats for Twitter and Facebook, Social Bakers (www.socialbakers.com) also tracks metrics for several unique Facebook sources, including Places and Apps.
• Crowdbooster—More than a raw analytics tool, Crowdbooster (http://crowdbooster.com) provides tips for optimizing social media activities that will increase engagement and social reach. Examples including recommending times for posting content and suggesting users to connect with.
• Awe.sm—This product offers link and content tracking, along with traditional social analytics. Awe.sm (http://totally.awe.sm) also has a very pretty interface.
• TwentyFeet—Aggregates metrics from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in a single data stream (www.twentyfeet.com).
• SimplyMeasured—Reports on social media analytics are made available via Excel exports; includes some very cool streams of data (http://simplymeasured.com).
• Most Shared Posts—This plugin shows the posts that are most shared on Google +1, Twitter and Facebook on the Wordpress site it is installed on. Most Shared Posts (http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/wordpress-plugins/most-shared-posts) was developed by Tom Anthony.
Editor's Note: PostRank and BackType were originally included in this list. The services have since been shut down after being acquired by Google and Twitter, respectively.
One member of our community, OnReact, mentioned that SEOptimize has a great post on tools designed specifically for Google+, some of which can be useful to gather the data mentioned earlier (see www.seoptimise.com/blog/2011/08/more-than-30-google-tools-extensions-tutorials-and-other-resources.html).
Other tools mentioned by our community include the following.
• Klout—Scored-based system that measures the social influence of brands and individuals across multiple networks. Scores are based on hundreds of factors, and users can earn “Klout Perks” based on their level of engagement with the Klout community (http://klout.com/home).
• Viralheat—This unified platform for social media management is unique in that it has publishing capabilities (www.viralheat.com).
• HootSuite—This web-based app allows users and teams to manage campaigns across multiple social media networks in a single dashboard. Provides analytics in custom-built reports. Other features provided based on membership level (http://hootsuite.com).
• SharedCount—Tracks URL shares, likes, and tweets via a simple interface (http://sharedcount.com).
• PeerIndex—Measures your interactions across the web to help you understand the impact of your social actions (www.peerindex.com).
Obviously, there are a ton of metrics and data worthy of attention, and no analytics product measures all of them in a single platform—at least, not yet. For now, marketers are stuck with measuring the value of social media by combining tools, manual collection, visit tracking via analytics, and plenty of questions about the value of social media. However, much like the SEO space, I expect that we'll see an increasing growth of metrics, tools, and sophistication from marketers, and value derived through participation and network growth. It's exciting to be an early adopter in this space.