What's Your Social Business Value ?

Every business owner or organization executive has heard about how important it is for them to have a presence online and/or engage existing and new customers via social media platforms. What they struggle with is understanding how to effectively measure the results of their social efforts. Here are three metrics every business owner and organization administrator should understand and use:

Referral traffic – You should be using your presence on social platforms to listen, monitor brand engagement, but also to drive traffic to your brand's website or e-commerce platform. You need to track that traffic, so you understand where site visitors come from, how long these visitors stay on the site and what pages they view.

Click-through Rate – It's not only important to know from what sites these visitors are coming from, but also what they're clicking on to get to your site. The click-through rate (CTR) for a keyword hyperlink or piece of content is the number of clicks divided by the number of times shown (impressions). For digital ads, it's a measure of how often someone clicks through a banner, Facebook text ad, promoted tweet and/or search engine keywords. The CTR can provide you with an idea of how engaging an ad or  piece of content is to your audience.

Conversions – Conversions are the holy grail for digital marketers. Are you able to "close the surf" and have visitors actually complete a purchase, register for ongoing information or download a product. It's measured by knowing the percentage of unique visitors who complete your call to action. The way this typically works is that your web analytics platform will create a snippet of code that you embed onto your site. Once the code is applied, the platform you’re using places a cookie on the user’s computer or mobile phone when one of your pages is clicked. This enables rainmakers to track how the user is moving through its site, en route to a final action or conversion.