Hey everyone – This post was written by Neil Shapiro. I worked with him on an Analysis Exchange project for Childspring International. He volunteered to write a guest post about social media that offers an interesting perspective on conversion measurement:
First came Web Analytics – and the end of the day it is all about the conversion rate. Then Social Media arrived which has created a completely new set of KPI’s. The question then becomes: How does social media affect a site’s conversion rate?
The fact is that Social Media is just an extension of your web site marketing. The old adage that word of mouth is your most powerful marketing tool applies to social media. What Social Media has done is give everyone the advantage of delivering the message quickly without needing a lot of technical support.
The Social Media Conversion Rate is simply the number of comments, or replies per post. This applies to a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and YouTube. How this can influence your site’s conversion rate is based on the message you deliver. The impact of the message you deliver will be measured by the Social Media monitoring tool you use.
A simple example is that you own an electronics accessory store and you decide to discount iPad Mini accessories on a one-day deal based on discount code at check out. Because you have the ability to activate a code quickly, you go and post it on Facebook and Twitter with a link back to your site.
When doing the analysis simply put there should be an increase in referring traffic from Facebook and Twitter, an increase in page views, and lastly an increase in sales. You can measure the incremental impact by looking at your overall site metrics the day before the sale compare them against the day of the sale, and then compare them the day after the sale.
The second Social Media metric that will influence a site conversion rate is WOM, known as Word Of Mouth. For Twitter, it is the number of retweets per tweet. Facebook and Google+ it is the number of shares per post. For YouTube it is the number of shareclicks per posted video.
Here is where your followers – customer are your brand advocates. Again, that impact from the social media side will be measured based on the social media tool you use. Your web analytics tool that you use will help you determine the incremental impact to your site conversion rate.