THE TOP DRIVER OF SOCIAL MEDIA ROI THAT YOU ARE PROBABLY MISSING

Attribution problems are likely the greatest barrier to social media ROI in the market today. The reality is that social media does a tremendous job of starting the conversation, but many times it isn’t the “last” place someone looks before making a purchase. Therefore, there are a lot of sales that social media influenced that go unreported.

Remarketing advertising offers an opportunity to segment social media users and show them targeted ads through the Google Ad Network or through Facebook using tools like AdRoll.

In order to do this with the Google Ad Network ,you will need to create a segment of users inside of Google analytics that came from any social channel. For example, create a separate segment for users referred by Twitter (t.co) or Facebook (fb.me).  Because the social referrer may come from a variety of different sources, it is imperative that you take the time to set up your segments properly and create a standard way of sharing links.

However, you can start to better control this so that your custom segments are spot on if you have Google Analytics. Every time you post a link on a social channel add tracking parameters that you can control. This free tool allows you to customize the source, medium and campaign that will report inside of Google Analytics. For the purposes of this discussion we are focused on the source. Put the social channel where you are promoting the link in the source field, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin, etc. If you want to know all the ins and outs of how to do this, check out this tutorial from Google.

With the combination of Google URL Builder to easily segment your social audience and adding a little line of remarketing code to your site you will be able to add massive layers of ad testing to figure out what drives social conversion. Here are some of my favorite things to test and attempt to answer:

1. Do Twitter or Facebook followers convert more often on direct response ads for our products or services?
2. Does remarketing with content marketing ads have a larger impact on social conversion than direct response ads?
3. Are social media followers more likely to convert into email subscribers before purchasing or vice versa?
4. Do remarketing ads that are aligned with the type of content in the link they originally clicked on more or less effective in driving conversions?

Remarketing offers a tremendous ability to finally test and measure social media’s role in both direct response and longer-tail conversions.  It’s easy to implement and inexpensive to test what conversion points will work with your social media fans and followers.

Did you notice? There is still one big gaping hole. You can currently only add visitors to remarketing lists if it is a link that goes to your own website. For most of us, we share up to 80% of our content that goes to a third party website, i.e. Mashable, CNN, etc. This is the value we provide to our audiences.

If you are interested, I have good news. SME Digital and WebMechanix solved this problem with our patent pending technology TRKS.IT. You will be able to track your third party links (links to someone else’s website) exactly the same way you track 1^st party links (links to your website) and add users who click links to remarketing lists based on which link they clicked. The product will launch into beta very soon for WordPress and Google Analytics users. If you are interested in being a tester please join the mailing list here.

Have you used remarketing to test different conversion opportunities with your social media followers? If so, what were the results? What have you tested to close the gap between social media engagement and conversion? Leave a comment and share your story!