Top Tools to Track Your Social Media Marketing Success

Social media can be a great source of quality traffic for businesses. It scales well, requires a minimal up-front investment, and is readily available globally. However, companies need to track their social media marketing strategies to evaluate their effectiveness in driving traffic to their website and improving their ability to generate and convert leads. But, how does your marketing team manage multiple social accounts, encourage proper engagement, analyse and track metrics, and prove their social platforms ROI? Simple. By using social media analytics tools. As part of larger social media management software platforms, analytics tools collect data (including engagement, replies, reposts) from all your connected accounts and compile them into reports that help break down the numbers to provide insights about your brand’s online performance. In this post, we’ll discuss how to make your social media marketing more productive using these analytics and tracking tools.

Popular Tools for Tracking and Measuring Social media Marketing Success

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free but feature-rich tool offering social media analytics. It enables you to see what visitors do while on your site, collects data, and uses the information to create customised reports and dashboards to track your social media marketing performance and improve your website.

With Google Analytics, you can identify metrics such as potential customer lifetime value or users who are most likely to convert. What’s more, you have access to Google’s proprietary audience data that you can use to segment your audience according to demographics or the products that users want and use this data to plan Google Ads and social media campaigns. Feeding this data into your social media calendar will further help you to engage with your audience when and how it suits them, and about what they want to hear about.

HubSpot

HubSpot has analytical tools that offer businesses social reports to measure campaign performance by comparing the performance of various social media marketing channels. The software aids monitoring engagement by allowing users to publish on-the-go directly through CRM.

HubSpot gives insights on your clients and customers throughout their conversion journey, as well as which marketing strategies perform the best among your target audiences. It’s excellent for businesses of any size and allows you to keep your campaign functions in a central place. Furthermore, its integrations make the tracking process more streamlined, while the detailed social media marketing performance reports allow you to break down and analyse the hard numbers.

Databox

The Databox analytics platform is expansive and puts all business data in a central place. You can set and track campaign goals using your account. It has a dashboard that shows all the key performance indicators (KPIs) and allows you also to customise the metrics that matter to your social media marketing channels or campaign. For example, you can choose to track only Facebook replies to your posts.

The Databox dashboard also allows you to view any integration you have, like HubSpot. It’s a suitable platform for businesses that:

Have numerous social media marketing accounts and contacts to keep track of
Manage social media marketing accounts for multiple clients
Have many specific campaign goals per channel

Facebook Attribution Tool

Facebook has about 1.56 billion active daily users, and over 160 million businesses use the site to market and connect with users. Its data-driven attribution model uses historical data to determine credit and give you insights into your customer’s path to conversion. By default, it selects a last-touch model with a 28-day click window and a one-day impression.

The social influence that you can achieve through Facebook is staggering, in terms of your e-commerce business, peer effects, customer relationships, referrals, brand awareness, reputation, and much more. Choosing the right attribution model for your business will depend on which metrics and touchpoints are most important to achieving your goals.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp operates as a full-service marketing platform offering social media analytics. It is easy to use, especially for small marketing teams, and it requires little effort and time to pour over social media analytics. It also offers:

An audience dashboard to track and understand audience behaviour
Smart targeting tools
Mobile integration tools

These tools can help diversify your social strategy and deliver high engagement numbers to help you create audience-specific content.

Grow.com

Grow.com gives you access to the full visibility of engagement for your social accounts. It connects to Microsoft Office, Google Ads, HubSpot, Marketo, Facebook, and Salesforce. You can combine it with other social listening or monitoring tools you use. It also breaks down complex data into visuals and graphs.

Attribution Tools

Attribution helps digital marketers get a clear picture of the specific role that their marketing channels play, and which activity leads to conversion events. It presently takes between about seven to over thirteen touches (engagements) to deliver qualified sales leads. This means that a customer or business that made a purchase could have interacted with your remarketing ad, website, email, Instagram, RLSA, landing page, or more within a month before converting.

Attribution modelling is useful in helping you measure and understand your digital marketing performance. Dedicated attribution tools usually use multi-touch attribution, which provides a broader look at the customer journey as a whole. Understanding the steps that users took before purchasing is arguably equally as valuable to a digital marketer as the sale itself.

In a nutshell, an attribution tool tells you which channel takes the credit for a conversion or sale. For instance, say a customer purchased after clicking your display ad. You could credit the wholesale to that ad, but if they took a convoluted route before buying, you would not get a clear picture of what led to them finally converting.

For marketers, ROI from their various advertising platforms is a critical measurement metric to pay close attention to regularly. It is not enough to rely on default numbers that advertising platforms (say Google analytics and Facebook reporting) report.

Along with customising attribution within your marketing platforms like Google Ads and Facebook, to suit your specific needs, utilising a dedicated attribution tool is smart marketing. Attribution tools help you get precise data on the specific channels that played a significant role in converting prospects. Platforms such as Singular and LeadsRX help business owners and e-commerce marketing managers get a complete view of ROI.

Different Types of Attribution Models

The following are the commonly used attribution models today:

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First Click

It’s a one-touch attribution model that gives all the credit to the first action that a buyer took during their conversion journey.

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Last Click

It’s a one-touch model that gives all conversion credit to the last touchpoint, and it does not consider any other engagements made with your marketing efforts before that.

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Linear

It’s a multi-touch model that takes into account all the touchpoints made along a buyer’s path.

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Time Decay

It gives more credit to those touchpoints that occur closer to the purchase as opposed to the beginning of the funnel.

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Position-Based

It gives the last and first engagement the most credit for conversion events while assigning the middle touchpoints the remaining credit.

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Data-Driven

The model uses past data collected to distribute conversion credit. Only those accounts with enough data can apply this attribution tool.

Over to You

The selection of the right social media analytics tool for your business should deliver the metrics you need and align with your goals. They should also work within your budget and time constraints. Often using a combination of tools can give you a more holistic view of how your social media efforts are impacting your business goals.

At MAXEMUS Digital Marketing, we help businesses improve their social media marketing strategies and performance to reach their goals. Don’t let analysis paralysis slow you down. Our Digital Springboard session will help you understand what tools you need and what to do to meet your goals. MAXEMUS can help you build unstoppable forward momentum in just 90 minutes to ensure you are confidently moving towards your goals.

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