So many marketers look at social media the same way Americans look at the metric system. We know it exists. Some of us know how to use it. But every time we try to show value behind it, we end up with a bruised ego. The challenge a social media marketer experiences is how to effectively showcase the bottom line; the ROI behind a tactic. Most executives are going to evaluate performance and value on amount of revenue driven by social media and number of units moved. These are critical areas that need to be addressed. The problem is, most campaigns lack the right tracking implementation to help build a case for social’s necessity moving forward, resulting in slimmed-down budgets. So, how do you protect your budget?
Last Click Conversion: In this scenario, CPC would get 100% of the credit for the conversion
First Click Conversion: In this scenario, email would get 100% of the credit for the conversion
Assisted Click Conversion: In this scenario, credit is shared through the funnel. Each click is viewed as an important part of the conversion
According to the aforementioned scenarios for last click and first click, social media would get zero credit for the conversion, even though it assisted the user along the purchase path. It’s when you report on assisted conversions that you are able to see the full purchase path and actually recognize how all of your marketing tactics contribute.
If you scaled back your social media efforts based on last click or first click, you would start to see conversions decline without the assistance of social media. More importantly, you may be unable to recognize that scaling back on social media is causing your decrease in conversions.
As marketers, it’s essential to understand the role of social media in your campaigns. It’s becoming much more common to find social interactions at the awareness/assist phase of your conversion funnel. With that in mind, go back to your data and start looking at the whole purchase funnel. Not sure if you’re capturing the right data? I’ll be following this post up with one about the basics of leveraging multi-click in Google Analytics.
