Measuring Success of Your Social Media and Website Efforts
“Marketing Charts” is one of my favorite places for quick explanations of social media and website development issues.
For the people I work with, a common question is measuring success. The “Marketing Charts” article below addresses the issue through an analysis of web metrics from a marketer’s point of view.
What Measures to Use?
For organizations starting a website/social media platform from scratch it’s a slog. It takes a long time to establish a website and growth depends on topic, popularity of the topic, competition, demographics and the number of articles, videos and audio you are capable of creating on a daily or weekly basis.
If you are creating frequent content and meeting the needs of your audience and reaching out to others to establish relationships and links, it should take one to two years to establish an effective audience.
How do you measure engagement? Well, that takes some discussion. I develop in WordPress and there are a variety of plug-ins that provide statistics; some providing dramatic differences as to what’s measured.
I use Google Analytics, JetPack and data from the hosting company on the theory that server statistics are probably the most reliable.
What I’ve found that, while instructive and helpful, data from these sources can differ considerably. Either you’re a schmuck or a genius depending on how you view your data.
Are You Accomplishing Your Goals?
But web statistics are not the issue. Assuming that you do the right things (which requires a hell of a lot of work) and are patient, it’s not a matter of data; it’s a mater as to whether or not you are accomplishing your goals:
For commercial sites, it’s sales.
For associations and nonprofits, it’s membership and contributions.
For government, it’s influence based on search results.
For advertisers, it’s time spent on site.
You could easily write a book (and many have) on the endless other metrics that have importance but unless you’re accomplishing your goals, the measurements seem irrelevant.
What the Experts Say (From Marketing Charts)
“Provided with a list of 19 new-media metrics, the highest proportion of marketers responding to the Association of National Advertisers survey rated purchases (67%) as a top-3 box rating on a 10-point scale of effectiveness, up from 53% in 2011.
Time spent (54% vs. 39%), would recommend/forward to a friend (51% vs. 39%), and registrations in general (51% vs. 39%) also saw increases in the proportion considering them to be effective.
New behavioral metrics identified this year-included number of shares (49% rating effective) and number of replies (also at 49%), as well as interaction rates (42%), video views (40%), number of re-tweets (39%), and number of uploads (39%). Impressions (31%) and number of likes (30%) were rated as effective by the fewest respondents.”
Your Opinions?
Best, Len.
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