Last year was closed with a big question, the great headache for marketers and SMEs, the famous ROI in Social Networks. Is it possible to measure it? In my opinion, yes. But I do not mean the possibility of measuring that ROI with the appearance of smoke of which so many speak, that deep down they do not know how to do it. I do not know if it will be 100% safe, the measurements are the ones they are and Google Analytics is not accurate.
Recall, ROI = Profit / Investment between the investment. It is the formula used to know if a business is profitable or not.
For example, we made an investment of 2000 dollars and we have obtained 6000 dollars of profits. Then the ROI would be equal to (6000 – 2000) / 2000 = 2%.
To know the percentage of benefits of our investment we can multiply the ROI by 100. That is,
With a ROI of 2% we would be earning 200% of the money invested, therefore, of each dollar invested we are obtaining 2 dollars (discounted the investment cost). ROI (Return of Investment) is not IOR (Impact of Relationship), It’s worth repeating it over and over again. Are brands interested in knowing what return they have on their investment of 1000? For a campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin, Youtube or the day-to-day running of your Community Manager.
They are interested, to a lesser extent, in how many new fans they have, how many RTs have generated their tweets, how many debates they have opened in Linkedin or how much the referred traffic from their social networks has improved.
One of the great problems that brands also have, Is to generate actions on social networks aimed at better understanding this ROI.
Therefore, I will give you 6 practical examples where I think we can get closer to measuring ROI in Social Networks, in off environments and online environments.
1. Setting Off line: Discount Bonds
We have an offline store, neighborhood, are “Furniture Pepito and want to know what brings us return each of the social networks that work:. Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus
publish a discount voucher 5 % For sofas during the whole month of January in each of the three social networks.We made 3 QR codes for each of the networks, which every time we scan does not lead to any website, but instead shows us in text format “CODEGOOGLE + “,” CODEFB “or” CODETWITTER. “
Mandatory, To benefit from that discount, they must submit that code. How much has this action cost us? Do we put a price on our creativity, at the time to create a code? How much have we got?
It’s a good way to determine ROI, is not it? If this action gives off more fans on Facebook, more followers on Twitter, more RT’s, plus +1 on Google Plus, great! That is the added value that we bring to the customer, but in terms of ROI, the profits are what we? Guarantee ?.
2. Environment Off line: Hot Time
We own a grocery store and once every 15 days we launch “La Hora Caliente” on our Twitter profile. We do a “promotional campaign” A couple of weeks before and we warned in time which day the offer will be published through which customers will be able to take advantage of a 10% in our products during a specific hour.
In the second half of the month, we perform the same action but through our channel on Instagram (we have photos of a great majority of our products and customers that are labeled under our hashtag #ultragramers).Previously, we have worked a strategy on Instagram (of course). We launch the offer.
What results have you had ?, How much did it cost ?, What have we entered ?, Which social network has worked best?
3. Environment Off Line: Survey
We have opened a store for 1 month and we promote our store in social networks with some time in advance. Every time customers buy, the POS prints a ticket where I ask the customer “How we met” (radio, chance, brochures, Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or others).
4. On Line Environment: Objectives
Once we create the objectives in Google Analytics, essential to know if the user who visits our website, is doing the actions that we want them to do, we can assign each social network an economic value.
If we give value to that goal, it will be sewing and singing. For this we must know the% of conversions that our goals have.
For ex. If out of every 100 contacts that ask for a budget, I close 10. I will have 10% of conversions.
If I make an average of the invoiced, I check that my accepted minimum budgets are 100 EUR and the maximum 1000 EUR. If the sum of these 10 budgets makes a total of 3000 EUR, we will understand that the value of each average objective will be approximately 300 EUR (3000 EUR / 10 budgets).
Compare this Analytics value to your actual revenue and see if it’s a metric you can use for your business.
In companies whose budgets are excessively large, determining ROI through Analytics Goals becomes virtually impossible.
5. On-Line Environment: E-Commerce
If we have an online store, it is a sin to not have the e-commerce code installed in Google Analytics. With this code installed, we will know the% of conversions in e-commerce with respect to visits, product performance, Of sales, time to purchase, etc.
If we want to see, how many of these purchases come from different sources, we access Product Performance and choose a Secondary Deduction. To know the yield and earnings that each source gives us for each product, we will choose Source or Source / Medium.
What brings us the best results ?, SEO, CPC, Newsletter, Social Networks ?. Of the Social Networks, which brings us more economic benefits?
How much are we investing in our Community Manager ?, What economic returns is my online store having in social networks regarding expenses?
6. On Line Environment:
URL Builder We can follow the tracking of any campaign and any link that takes us directly to a landing page that is ready to convert thanks to URL Builder.
We can generate different URLs and name the campaigns with the name of the social network through where we want to publish our links and so will appear in Analytics.
They can be included when updating Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin, … the network that we choose. It’s interesting to try a different URL for each network and see which works best for us.
Once you created the goal for this example that I put you in the section thanks for getting in touch, the conversion would be associated with your particular social network.
And for you, what is the best way to measure ROI? We can generate different URLs and name the campaigns with the name of the social network through where we want to publish our links and so will appear in Analytics. They can be included when updating Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin, … the network that we choose. It’s interesting to try a different URL for each network and see which works best for us. Once you created the goal for this example that I put you in the section thanks for getting in touch, the conversion would be associated with your particular social network.