A large number of businesses and individuals don’t really measure or track their ROI (return on investment). A great majority is unaware of the ROI and those who know something about ROI can’t track it or don’t actually know how to get started with it. Businesses and individuals needs to know the impact of their every social media or investment activity whether positive or negative. Getting started with measuring ROI for every single social media investment activity seems impossible but it is not. There are a number of metrics that are needed to be tracked or monitored. Following is a brief description to different steps that will help you to measure the ROI in effective way.
Defining Goals
The first and most important part of measuring or tracking down the ROI is to define your goals that must be clear and concise. You have to be very much sure about the outcome of your social media activity before proceeding to calculate ROI. There is another thing which needs to be tracked before you are actually going to track the ROI for a particular social media campaign. This is related to defining the current baseline of your media campaign for which you want to calculate the ROI. If you know your starting point only then you will be able to accurately calculate the ROI for any given campaign.
Calculating ROI
While calculating the ROI for your marketing campaign you need to be very much sure whether you need an increase in your website visitors or your goal is to increase the sales out of the marketing campaign (this is related to defining your goals as stated above). In fact you would not be looking for only a substantial increase in your website visitors alone but also an increase in the sales of your product.
ROI measurement tools
There are a lot of ROI measurement tools available for free. Every tool has its own set of parameters and ROI calculation criteria. Some of the tools are Google analytics, Omniture, HootSuit etc.
- Google analytics: Using Google Analytics you can keep track a number of factors related to your website. You can keep track of the areas people click the most when visit your website and the regions of the world where you are getting the clicks during a specified time interval.
- Omniture: Omniture provides various services that you can go back and forth and track the outcome of your marketing campaign.
- HootSuit: HootSuit offer a remarkable twitter manager. It also provides an exceptional analytics to measure the impact of social media campaigns actually turning out to transactions or not.
There are a number of sentiment analysis tools that are used for twitter such as Crimson Hexagon, Viral Heat, and Sentiment Metrics etc. A brief description of these is given below:
- Crismson Hexagon: It is a social media tracking tool for enterprise level businesses. It helps you know the sentiment of the consumer on the basis of social media mentions.
- Viral Heat: It provides an inexpensive tracking of social media campaigns.
- Sentiment Metrics: It is another important social media tracking tool for large businesses.
Correlating the Data
Now that you have defined the goal and baseline of the campaign its time to correlate the data trends shown by the tracking tool to your goals. You have to calculate whether you are heading towards achieving your goals with time or is it only helping in getting your more clicks. You have to decide whether an increase in the investment brings you more sales or not and here it’s crucial to look your business needs and trends followed by successful competitors.