How to Measure and Evaluate Social Media for Lead Generation

It’s easy to be confused by the profusion of social media metrics — particularly when the goal is lead generation measurement. The bottom line: are your social media programs driving engagement that results in revenue generation for the company.

While there a more than a dozen social media metrics that are tracked, some reveal much greater business value than others. For example, the numbers of comments, subscribers, and followers have much higher lead-generation value than views, frequency, and reach.

If one of your lead-generation strategies is content promotion, then you will want to measure traffic from social to a specific article (or to any kind of URL). Use Google Analytics to look at the page in the Landing Pages report, but filter to show just visitors from social.

Tracking results in Google Analytics from a specific social media campaign is important. These are all “campaigns” and can be tracked with campaign tracking codes. Without them, some visitors will be categorized as direct traffic, others will be tracked as referral traffic.

The goal is to get data that drives sound marketing decisions. That is possible, even when tracking a tricky, diverse source of traffic such as social media. Please note: lead conversion rates for visitors from social media will be lower than those of the other traffic sources.

TW has a new eGuide on social media lead generation that is a must-read for marketers. It’s called, How Best-Practice Social Media Enhances Revenue Generation: It’s Not Just About Brand Building Anymore. Get your copy now.