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With the amount of data pouring in from social media platforms, the number of metrics you could look at is almost dizzying. But not all metrics are equally valuable. Knowing what metrics to focus on and what tools to use is going to save a lot of time. This time you save is much better spent developing your marketing strategy and optimizing your lead conversion rate.

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is the basic measure to assess how efficient your social media pages are. The metric looks at the number of people that visit your website via social media posts. The impact of this metric on your conversion rate is pretty straightforward if you think about it. If people don’t end up on your website through your social media pages, then you’re not doing your job right. But how do you differentiate social referrals from the rest?

Luckily, the developers behind Google Analytics understand this, so they’ve added a special tab under Traffic Sources specifically for this metric. You can find all of the info you need under the Social tag. Here you can see how many people have visited your social media page, and what percentage of those users ended up on your webpage. Nice and simple. Of course, referral rates are not going to translate into conversion immediately. The way in which you set up your landing page is just as important as getting your leads to visit.

Post Reach

Every marketer knows that posting a lot of content is sure to attract more users. But that’s not enough to influence engagement and conversion rates. What you need to check is an often overlooked metric in Facebook Analytics, the “People Talking About This” chart.

You obviously know what an average Facebook feed looks like. New posts might gain a couple of likes, and a few shares here and there, but eventually they’re going to get lost in the flood of new posts coming in. Getting people to talk about your page long after the post has disappeared in their feed is a much more valuable determiner of a successful conversion.

Why? Because taking a user from new lead to buyer, to ultimately loyal customer takes a lot of time. If you lose them along the way, it’s going to be that much harder to get them back.

Response Rate

Social media platforms are means of reaching out to people. As such, there’s a good way and a bad way to use them.
So when you’re considering what metrics to track to improve your conversion rates, you should also look at the ones that tell you something about how you’re using them, not just how your leads are using them.

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Tracking your response rates is going to give some really valuable insight into customer engagement and satisfaction on your end. Customer satisfaction is one of the leading factors in lead conversion.

Most social media analytics tools only focus on the external usage of your platforms, namely, on your users. Look at what’s going on behind the scenes as well. Determine whether your social media managers are responding in a timely fashion, and how many comments they are addressing. You could use Slack to collaborate with your team to handle mentions.

Engagement Data

By measuring your social media engagement, you can ascertain which methods work best in reaching out to your social media audience.
Figure out which posts did best, A/B test variations of elements and time to determine your working formula and replicate it to maximize your social media results.

DrumUp offers an analytics module that allows you to determine which post performed best on your social media pages. The new click data feature tells you how many people actually clicked on the URL on your post. Each of the analytics features can be filtered by keyword, engagement type or date. You could even study engagement data over a period of time.

Users’ Sentiments

Feelings don’t really seem like the sort of thing you’d want to measure and analyze when you’re trying to be efficient. But looking at the emotions your followers express in relation to your business can give you more valuable, and even actionable insight that other, more impersonal metrics. Because they can tell you not just how social users engage with your brand, but how they do it, and what they care about when they do it.

Social Mention is a free online tool that can help you track this metric. It works basically like any other search engine. You just type in a keyword, and it will show you a chart of users’ sentiments, among other things, related to that keyword.

This also makes it a great content optimization tool. It can help you capitalize on popular trends and create unique posts that truly speak to your customers.

Assisted Conversion Rates

Sometimes, users might go to your webpage via social media, and not convert instantly. But they may come back later and convert.

The final conversion didn’t happen directly through social media, but it did help. That’s why this metric is called assisted conversion. It’s important to keep track of this metric because otherwise you might not get a clear picture of the impact of your social media pages. And considering the number of stats you have to deal with, you’ll need as much clarity as you can get.

Plus, if you dismiss this metric, you might end up thinking that your social media pages aren’t working as they should, and you end up spending a lot of time and effort into fixing something that isn’t broken.

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Besides, it’s quite easy to check assisted conversions. Google Analytics has a special tab that shows if users clicked on your link from a social media page before conversion, even if it didn’t happen on the spot.

These are just some of the more important, and sometimes overlooked metrics that can help you optimize your social media pages, and improve your conversion rates. Since each brand is different, so will their clients be, and what works for some might not work for others. Marketing is a field that has to deal with people, and as such, it has to remain flexible at all times.

Author Bio: Dustin Ford is a Colorado-based writer. He is deeply fascinated with everything that has to do with personal branding, online marketing, technology, and gadgets.

Image Credit: Pixabay.com