Social Visits and Leads Metric

Social Visits and Leads Definition

The Social Visits and Leads metric measures how effective social media campaigns are at driving visitors and leads to your website. This metric is one of the best ways to demonstrate return on marketing investment for social media campaigns as it shows a clear path from campaign to conversion. The next step with this metric is to plot key interactions to see if there's a correlation between new leads and wins from specific social media posts.

Key Terms

• Leads: New prospects generated by a marketing campaign.
• Wins: New customers generated by a marketing campaign.

Success Indicators

• A high number of leads and visitors from a social media campaign.
• A high visit to lead conversion rate from social media visitors.

Social Visits and Leads Challenges

• While cold hard numbers are important to quantifying your site's success, there are some things that simply can't be measured through analytics. Google Analytics provides a wealth of information on the behavior of the user's experience, but they tell you nothing about the quality of their experience: the first impression upon visiting the site, how they felt when leaving, ease of use, understanding of the company's values and services, brand recognition, etc. Activities such as user testing can provide more insight into some of these important, but less tangible, measures of your site's success.

Social Visits and Leads Best Practices

Jackie Kmetz, Global Product Marketing Manager, SMB at Concur an SAP Company

• While this [Social Visits and Leads] is arguably the most important metric to use when measuring social media marketing ROI, it doesn’t usually apply for many situations and brands. Review your social media goals, your business and customer acquisition process to see if this calculation makes sense for you. Then take another look at the traffic you’re generating from social media sites. Of that traffic, how many of those website and blog visitors are converting into leads? Now take that leads data one step further. Are your social media leads actually turning into customers? How many? Being able to attribute actual customers can be a powerful indicator that the time you’re spending on social media marketing is driving tangible results.

Mark Traphagen, Senior Director of Online Marketing, Stone Temple Consulting

• While it is probably rare that someone sees a single tweet or Facebook post, clicks through to your site, and then immediately makes a purchase or fills out a lead form, once they are on your site, the following questions come into play:

  • Is your content helpful, relevant to why they clicked the social media link, and of high enough quality that the visitor might want to see more, either on that visit or in the future? In other words, what is your landing page doing to convert them from visitor to potential fan?
  • Do you have appropriate, well-tested and optimized opportunities for the visitor to convert in whatever way fits your goals?

  In other words it is not the job of social media to sell. That’s the job of your site. Social media’s job is to get people to the location where potential conversion happens and to move them along on their journey toward conversion.

  How does all that relate to social engagement metrics? Evaluate your engagement on various social networks in correspondence to how well those networks are doing at driving traffic to your site. If a network has high engagement but drives little traffic, either reevaluate your presence there or evaluate how you can better target your audience on that network.

SalesForce Marketing Cloud

• You can track revenue in different ways, depending on your business model. For B2B companies, you may label a lead as a person who has downloaded an ebook and completed a form in exchange for content. With a B2C company, you may track users who have perused or purchased on your ecommerce website, or someone who signed up for your company newsletter, and label them customers. Regardless of what you call it, make sure you can properly attribute leads and revenue that comes from social media.

How to Monitor Social Visits and Leads in Real-time

Once you have established benchmarks and targets for Social Visits and Leads, you’ll want to establish processes for monitoring this and other social media KPIs. Dashboards can be critical in this regard.

Learn more about how to track your Social Visits and Leads on a Social Media Dashboard.

Returning Visit Metric: Top Resources

Attracting the RIGHT Website Traffic for Lead Generation, Stacy Bouchard

Top 7 Metrics for Tracking Social Media ROI, Jackie Kmetz