Social Media Acquisition Reporting Basics [Advanced Solutions]

As the title of this blog sug­gests I write about advanced top­ics.  How­ever, some­times even the more “basic” ver­sions of what I talk about are still advanced.   So when I refer to basics in this post I don’t mean it is as sopho­moric or some­thing you should assign to an intern.

Recently, I wrote about Face­book inte­gra­tions and YouTube inte­gra­tions and after talk­ing to a lot of clients about the solu­tions I real­ized that some clients may appre­ci­ate insights on the basics of social media track­ing.  This post is about what you can do right now with­out any addi­tional cost.  These are the “basics” that you should be imple­ment­ing or in the process of imple­ment­ing.  Note: Adobe Con­sult­ing Ser­vices are experts on set­ting these up for clients.

Social Media Processes

In the sim­plest form you should have a process or sys­tem in place to cre­ate cam­paign codes for all your social media links.  For exam­ple, if you have some­one who tweets then every time they have a link in one of their tweets they should always include a cam­paign code.  You should have the same processes in place for ALL social plat­forms you are invest­ing in.

If you don’t have a process in place, then here is some advice on build­ing the process.

1.       Build a sys­tem if pos­si­ble.  A web­page should be more than enough to have a user enter in the link infor­ma­tion then have the web­page gen­er­ate the cam­paign code or link for the user.  If you are tech­ni­cally able, then you can have that same page send the clas­si­fi­ca­tion val­ues to Site Cat­a­lyst automatically.

2.       Come up with a sim­ple struc­ture for the cam­paign codes. If you have not done so already then I strongly advised that you do have a com­pany wide struc­ture.  It can be as sim­ple as “sm:fb:12345″  where sm stands for social media, fb stands for Face­book and 12345 is the unique code for the campaign.

Once you have a good process in place then you will be able to build reports on all the dif­fer­ent social media plat­forms you are invest­ing in.

Clas­si­fy­ing Referrers

Clas­si­fy­ing refer­rers should be the next step in your report­ing.  If you have not already then you should watch this video(clas­si­fi­ca­tions start at about the 28 min mark). You can learn how other clients are clas­si­fy­ing their refer­rers and how they are gain­ing insight from it.

A cru­cial part to clas­si­fy­ing refer­rers is to have a doc­u­ment that keeps track of what is clas­si­fied and why.  Social media is con­stantly chang­ing and your clas­si­fi­ca­tions should change also.

Also the video has a link to whitepa­per titled, “What is the Value of Social Media?” That you can down­load from the video page.

ROI Reports

Once you have the processes in place to accu­rately report on Social Media acqui­si­tion and you build the clas­si­fi­ca­tion then you want to build your ROI reports.

There are many ways to build these reports so feel free to use your imag­i­na­tion but I am only going to cover the most sim­ple of them.

Build an excel report where you take the clas­si­fied refer­rers report and pull in rev­enue or any other impor­tant con­ver­sion met­ric.  Then add a col­umn for what you invest in that plat­form.  Even if you have a high level guess for what you invest then it is bet­ter than noth­ing.   Finally, build out an equa­tion to see if you are mak­ing or los­ing money on the spe­cific social media platform.

Here is an exam­ple excel report:

Next Steps

Once you have the basics setup and in place you will want to inves­ti­gate the more advanced solu­tions such as the Youtube Inte­gra­tion, Twit­ter Inte­gra­tion or Face­book Inte­gra­tion. The more advanced solu­tions will give you more insight into how you can improve your ROI on social media and make more informed decisions.

Other posts you might be inter­ested in:

• Face­book Inte­gra­tion, Valu­able? Definitely!
• Youtube — Yup, We Track That! [Advanced Solutions]

As always, post your com­ments or e-mail me at pearcea (at) adobe​.com.  It is your com­ments and e-mails that keep me post­ing and give me ideas for future posts.