How to track your sales from social media (a comprehensive guide to lead values and link tracking)
Instead of giving you details about how UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module (blahdy blah blah blah)
I’m going to tell you that if you want to build a social team, get a raise as social team member or win as a business with the power of social media. Track. Your. Links.
But before you can track your links you have to have do a couple things.
Know your lead values.
For every link clicked, how much money is it worth? No lead values? No social links for you! But seriously, if the social team doesn’t know how much a link click from social to the website is worth, they should be very hesitant to post the link. You need to know what the reward for making people leave the platform will be. I don’t recommend being a jerk about this, but every single time you cause a user to leave their cozy social feed for a link, it better be worth it because the Eye of Sauron I mean Zuckerberg is looking at you.
Here’s two questions to ask to calculate your lead values properly:
1. What percentage of clicks lead to purchases, signups, or other revenue driving actions?
This is your Conversion Rate (CR)
2. What is the average revenue per completed conversion?
This is your Average Revenue Per Conversion (ARPC)
What we are trying to do is paint the narrative that would look something like:
If 10% of clicks convert into a $100 sale, this means each individual click is worth $10 based on your ARPC. Therefore when one social post drove 10,000 link clicks using these numbers, you’d have generated $100,000… for one post. Any CEO I’ve worked with says one thing when faced with these numbers… do that again please!
The point is, we HAVE to decide a dollar amount per behavior/action taken. This is the MOST common problem when I hear “Social doesn’t make any money” and how a whole department that is producing all of the money gets their budget sliced in half and then everyone wonders why the EcOnOmY is so bad… give me a break.
Social can’t control what a user sees when they hit the website. But they can clearly show what a user intends to find when they get there.
While we don’t need this to get started, user intent (where they’re coming from and what they want to do) plays an important factor here in the story of sales through social and it’s why knowing your lead source is pretty important. With proper lead source data we can begin to see exactly what the conversion rate is per platform, per post type and marketing messaging to make better informed decisions. And yes, still talking about organic social NOT paid btw.
2. UTM link builder portal
No this isn’t a doorway to another dimension.
It’s how you create your links.
Oh your web team is sowwy becawse they down’t have google anawitics setup and or downt cuwwently give access to mawketews.
Too bad. How can you know your numbers if there is no system to accurately capture them? Again, no links for you.
This is a marketing data problem. If your company is struggling to 1. Get web analytics set up. 2. Understand it’s lead values I suggest it’s high time to work with a marketing consultant who can help you nail this down. Contact us for recommendations.
Until we (Entersquare) build a tool for this, you should use the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder. Not because I’m succumbing to the overlords of the interwebs, but because I genuinely believe they have the fastest path for you to get started tracking your links. It’s likely your website has GA and there’s tons of tutorials. It’s almost easy enough for a caveman with internet access.
IF YOU DO THIS YOU WILL BE BETTER OFF.
I have put this in to practice with many businesses and every single time very revealing things happen. 1. Social is making the business a ton of money they didn’t know it was. 2. The business isn’t making any money from leads period. 3. Other channels are killing it but organic social is sucking. 4. A type of messaging and creative is way outperforming any other type of “ad” cough- organic content over sales content cough-
Each of these data points can be crucial to growing your business and making money on social.
Our team at Entersquare can help you:
Make your links
Track your clicks
Get yer leads
Count your cash
If this sounds good to you, schedule a strategy call today.