In the dynamic world of social media marketing, knowing how to measure the success of your campaigns is crucial. We’ve gathered six expert perspectives, including those of CEOs and Social Media Managers, to share their most effective strategies. From utilizing URL tracking parameters to calculating ROI using ad tools, discover the diverse approaches these professionals recommend for tracking and measuring the ROI of a social media campaign.

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Contents

1 Utilize URL Tracking Parameters
2 Outline Goals and Track Conversions
3 Leverage Facebook’s Built-In Analytics
4 Assign Values to Social Metrics
5 Track Campaigns with Google Analytics
6 Calculate ROI Using Ad Tools

Utilize URL Tracking Parameters

When evaluating social media campaign return on investment, I find incorporating URL tracking parameters to be an extremely insightful approach. Specifically, I append campaign tags to links included within my social posts and ads promoting the content.

For example, adding ?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=spring_sale to the URLs in a Twitter ad campaign centered on a seasonal promotion. This allows me to attribute any site visitors, leads, or customers generated from social back to the specific campaigns driving that traffic. By incorporating these unique tracking codes at the source across social platforms, I have transparency into which posts and audiences deliver the highest value and engagement.

From there, I can layer on costs around ad spend, creative development, and management to calculate true campaign ROI. This helps me identify my most and least efficient social investments and optimize my strategies moving forward. Perhaps Instagram followers convert at a multiple of 2X our Facebook community—that insight informs where I allocate more budget to amplify reach.

By tagging social links to capture hard business impact data like pipeline and revenue, I move beyond vanity metrics to truly understand the financial return generated from our presence on social platforms. I strongly encourage all marketers to implement URL campaign tagging as a best practice for unlocking social media attribution. The insights it uncovers around visibility, engagement, and conversions are invaluable for maximizing your program effectiveness.

Anup Kayastha Featured 2 6 Effective Approaches to Track Social Media Campaign ROI

Anup Kayastha, Founder, Serpnest

Outline Goals and Track Conversions

Tracking and measuring ROI on social media, particularly within healthcare, can be tricky. In order to do so, we need to outline our goals first. Are we trying to drive traffic to a website or online directory? Is the objective to increase brand awareness? Who’s our audience?

More than ever, people are using social media as a search engine. When it comes to health information, we want to make sure they are getting reliable content that points them in the right direction—finding the right doctor or service. If we see those conversions, it’s a win.

Emily Mullin Featured 6 Effective Approaches to Track Social Media Campaign ROI

Emily Mullin, Social Media Manager, LifeBridge Health

Leverage Facebook’s Built-In Analytics

One approach that can be effective for tracking and measuring the ROI of a social media campaign, particularly on Facebook, involves utilizing Facebook’s robust analytics tools. It’s all built into the platform and is completely optimized for your benefit, so don’t overthink it. Take advantage of this easy-to-use tool.

For organic content, analyze engagement metrics like likes, shares, comments, and reach to assess the impact of your posts on brand visibility and audience interaction. By comparing these metrics against your campaign goals and investment, you can gain valuable insights into the performance and ROI of your social media initiatives.

For ad campaigns, you should closely monitor metrics such as cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and return on ad spend (ROAS) to gauge the effectiveness of paid efforts. This can all be tracked in Facebook’s analytics tool as well.

Ryan Kelly Featured 6 Effective Approaches to Track Social Media Campaign ROI

Ryan Kelly, Chief Marketing Officer, Easy Ice

Assign Values to Social Metrics

While I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all solution for this, my suggestion is to assign a value to the results of each portion of your social media campaign. Impressions, engagements, link clicks, etc., that come from a social media source should be given a specific value and then measured against the costs of running your campaign to determine the ROI. These metrics matter, but as there is difficulty in knowing the exact value to the business, I find that assigning that value at a conservative estimate is a good way to do it.

You can do this yourself, or just plug the numbers into an ROI calculator tool that is offered by numerous businesses, which makes it a bit easier to measure the social media ROI when it comes to brand awareness, lead generation, and hiring.

Kate Kandefer Featured 1 6 Effective Approaches to Track Social Media Campaign ROI

Kate Kandefer, CEO, SEOwind

Track Campaigns with Google Analytics

As a professional working at a web design agency, one specific approach that I find effective for tracking and measuring the ROI of a social media campaign is using Google Analytics. By setting up tracking codes for each social media platform, we can see which platform is driving the most traffic and conversions to our client’s website.

For example, let’s say our client is a clothing brand and we launch a social media campaign promoting their new summer collection. We would create unique tracking codes for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and any other platform we use to promote the collection. Then, we would monitor the traffic and conversions that each platform generates, and compare that data to the cost of running the campaign.

This allows us to calculate the ROI for each platform and make data-driven decisions about where to allocate our budget for future campaigns. By using Google Analytics, we can also see which specific posts or ads are driving the most traffic and conversions, allowing us to optimize our social media content for maximum ROI.

Tom Molnar Featured 2 6 Effective Approaches to Track Social Media Campaign ROI

Tom Molnar, Operation & Project Manager, Fit Design

Calculate ROI Using Ad Tools

Attaching a number to social media’s impact on business outcomes is always something of a tea-leaf-reading game, but in my experience, a fairly simple yet effective way of measuring your ROI on a social media campaign is to use something like HubSpot’s Ad ROI calculator.

The process is pretty simple, as all you need to do is input your projected monthly budget, your expected CPC, target conversion rate, average sale price, and lead-to-customer rate, and voilà, you get a pretty solid look at your ROI for advertising spend. It isn’t the only tool that does this, and you can probably do some back-of-the-napkin math if you don’t feel like using it, but I find it a quick and easy way to get your ROI on social media campaigns for businesses that don’t invest heavily into their in-house analytics.