Social Traffic and Conversions Metric

Social Traffic and Conversions Definition

The Social Traffic and Conversions KPI measures the effectiveness of social media campaigns at generating website traffic and goal conversions. Social media marketing needs to feed into other areas of your sales and marketing efforts, and provide a measureable return on marketing investment. One of the most reliable ways to measure social media ROI is to monitor the amount of web traffic that comes from each social platform, and how many goals result from those visits.

Like any other web traffic source, social media traffic can be analyzed to determine which sites hold the most value for your social media efforts. By calculating goal conversion rates (GCR) for each social media site, you can understand how well your message is resonating with that audience. If the message is on point and relevant, your goal conversion rates will reflect that; if goal conversion rates are low, perhaps you need to reassess your strategy to cultivate higher quality leads.

Key Terms

• Referral traffic: Visitors that visit your site by clicking on a URL on another website.
• Conversions/goals: A marketing objective for your audience to complete, such as subscribing to a mailing list.
• Conversion rate: The number of web visitors divided by the number of goals completed.

Success Indicators

• A high GCR coupled with high traffic from key social media platforms.

Social Traffic and Conversions Best Practices

Kissmetrics

• A decrease or an increase in post activity. As you adjust your schedule, notice if there is an increase or decrease in post activity? More clicks? More retweets? More shares? Sometimes, this is a gut-level check, and other times you might want to dip into your Bit.ly stats or utilize custom Google Analytics tags to make sure you are right.

Jawad Khan, Social Media Explorer

• Use high conversion keywords. Here are some of the high conversion keywords for leading social networks:
• Facebook – Where, When, Tell Us, Inspire, Submit, Deals, Discount, Warns, Amuses
• Twitter – ReTweet, Follow, Social Media, New Blog Post, Check Out, Help, Top
• LinkedIn – Created, Improved, Increased, Developed, Reduced, Researched
• Google+ – Share, Promote, Increase, Create, Discover
• Use a social media friendly website structure. Just like your content quality, the structure of your website also has a direct impact on the number of shares and social media followers you manage to attract. Most of the times, visitors find you either through your social media updates or from Google search results. You need to have a website structure that encourages these visitors to share your content and follow you social media.
• Enable Twitter Cards: Twitter cards display additional information about your links, blog posts or products. They also increase the engagement levels on your Tweets.
• Use Facebook OpenGraph: Add the Open Graph meta-tags to your blog so that your featured image is always displayed. You can find detailed instructions on using Open Graph in this post.
• Add Social Media Sharing Widget: I recommend using AddThis or DiggDigg to add social media sharing and follow widgets.

Dan Smith, SEO Specialist, Leighton

• If you’re seeing a lot of visitors referred from social media to your website, but you’re getting minimal conversions or a high bounce rate, you need to question whether you’re sending people to the most suitable page possible.

  If you’re promoting an offer on a football shirt, for example, but are directing people to the home page of your website, it’s unlikely the majority of people will then go and look around your website trying to find the shirt.

  What’s important to note here is that if you are directing people to the right page, just spend a couple of minutes checking — I’ve seen it happen plenty of times in the past where there has been an error with the URL shortening service, or the page throws up a 404 error because the name was recently changed.

  It’s all about reducing the amount of clicks it takes a visitor to go from just that to a paying customer. The quicker and more efficient the customer journey is, the more likely it is they’ll convert.

How to Monitor Social Traffic and Conversions in Real-time

Once you have established benchmarks and targets for Social Traffic and Conversions, 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 Traffic and Conversions on a Social Media Dashboard.

Social Traffic and Conversions: Top Resources

How to Easily Double Your Traffic from Social Media, Kissmetrics

Social Media Now Drives 31% of All Referral Traffic, Jay DeMers

4 Tools to Drive Conversions From Your Social Traffic, Yoav Vilner

7 Effective Ways to Increase Your Social Media Traffic and Conversions, Jawad Khad

How to Increase Website Traffic From Social Media, Ian Cleary