Rev & Reach Episode 11 – Signal vs. Noise: Decoding Social Media Analytics That Drive ROI Gone Wrong – Transcript

00:08
LORI: Hello, everybody. I’m Lori Jo Vest, and it is time for episode 11 of Rev and Reach. And today, we’re talking about signal versus noise: decoding social media analytics that drive ROI. Now, analytics for social and ROI are almost two totally separate things, right? Absolutely. Kiley, like, what do we mean by ROI?

00:31
KILEY: Yeah, so, so analytics is exactly how it sounds, right? It’s the numbers behind each post, behind your month, how you did, how things are going, etc., etc. Engagement, clicks, video views, things of that nature. ROI is, you know, whether you have an outside agency like us, or you have an internal social media manager that does all of your business’s marketing on social—it’s whether or not you’re actually seeing your desired results. That’s almost never engagement clicks, website traffic, especially if that website traffic’s not converting. That’s kind of what we mean.

01:13
It’s the difference between those high numbers looking pretty and them actually getting the job done, right. So, yeah, if you’re a restaurant, it’s increasing people, like the actual foot traffic into your restaurant. If you’re a dental clinic, it’s, um, you know, increasing appointments booked and consultation scheduled, and that converting into, you know, real treatments, etc., etc. You know, if you’re retail, it’s increasing sales, things of that nature. Can analytics sometimes be an okay indicator that ROI is coming or that things are working? In some industries, I would say it’s easier than others to make that connection, but not always. It’s kind of the same point as how going viral isn’t ROI, right? Yeah, it’s fun to have high numbers and really high engagement and know that people are interested. But if they’re not taking that desired action, what’s the point, you know?

02:14
LORI: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it’s so funny because, like, we really pay a lot of attention to our analytics. We’re always looking at the back end, how many people engaged with a post? You’ll hear us talk about engagement, and what that means is the number of people that chose to engage with the post, which is like, share, comment, divided by the number of people who saw it. And it’s listed as a percentage. So we use engagement as a way to show that the audience is interested in our content. If nobody ever engages, they’re not interested. We’re not doing it right, and it’s one of those things that we use to determine what content should be promoted.

02:59
For example, one of our dental practices. I, you know, we know the types of content that’s going to perform, but sometimes we’re surprised. Sometimes it’s a little, you know, you’ll see one that really rises above and you can’t really quite put your finger on why. Well, I’ll go in and that one that performed organically, I’ll put money behind it so it gets shown to a lot more people, because I know the audience appreciates it. So engagement is a good way to indicate that it’s content that your audience likes. Right conversion is what happens later. I mean, it’s all the way to the end of the kind of customer process is getting the consumer to either like, click on an application for volunteering, make a donation, print a coupon, and go to the store, you know, those kinds of things.

03:31
So conversion is great. And when we do social media, we’re paying attention to everything. We’re paying attention to followers. We’re paying attention to click-throughs, website traffic. We have a client that’s global, and the most important metric to them is educating their audience about the value of this particular material used in automotive manufacturing. Website traffic is the biggest indicator that we’re providing the information that that audience needs. And we get 10,000 or so a month on that particular website, so it’s a good indicator that we’re doing it right, right? Absolutely. What else do we use analytics for, Kiley?

04:31
KILEY: I mean, the possibilities with analytics really are endless, despite the fact that they don’t directly signal ROI in every case, right? If, you know, your call to action, like Lori said, is to visit the website or to learn more here, or, you know, in this case, you’ll see on our social, you know, in a few weeks, to click on this podcast episode and listen to the full thing, right? So clicks are really important.

05:00
One thing that we will say all the time about links and posts is that you want to give your audience the opportunity to say no. You don’t want to say no for them when it comes to learning more. And to learn more, that almost always includes a link to somewhere else. So I would say clicks are pretty important in regard to it; kind of, if you’re looking for increased website traffic in any regard, whether it’s to a podcast or to make more sales or to learn more or whatever, you know, if people are engaging with that and actually clicking to learn more, it is a signal that they’re interested, and that whether it was your copy or your graphic or your video or your photo, there was an element of your post that was enticing enough that made them think, oh, maybe I am interested. Let me click. You know, we’ve talked about conversion, we’ve talked about engagement.

05:55
I think video views are increasingly more important because, you know, again, you have about two to seven seconds in a video to grip your audience, and if that two to seven seconds really isn’t that interesting, you’ve lost them to the endless mindless scroll, right? Especially in informative and educational videos, because if you’ve used some witty headline or some witty opening comment and then locked them in, they will, you know, retain whatever it is that you’re telling them in the video content. I think that’s one of the reasons videos are so much stronger than photos and graphics, particularly today.

06:40
There are, I mean, truly, there are so many metrics that it’s kind of hard to put as much attention to all of them as you may want to. I would say that, in general, the ones that we probably look at the most as a signal that the content that we’re creating for our audiences is at the very least engaging and keeping you interested are clicks, video views, engagement. I would say reach is important in the sense that you want more people, obviously, to see your content, but if the quality of your audience is there, I would say it matters a little bit less than the other ones. You know, would you agree?

07:26
LORI: Yeah, absolutely. And I know we have some clients that the actual conversion is not necessarily the goal for nine months of the year. We have a social media account that’s a charter school, and what they want to do nine months of the year is communicate with the parents and keep them informed of the wonderful things they’re doing at school, and also get community support. So get the community involved, and it’s a specific charter school focused on a nationality, so we target the audience around so that we get the support of that cultural community, and they know about us, and they know what the school does, and they know how into really promoting and educating the students about their culture it is.

08:19
So the metrics can vary. You know what’s important can vary, and you always want to keep an eye on it because if you’re getting more engagement, more comments, more likes, more shares, it’s going to get shown to significantly more people because the algorithm pays attention to that. The algorithm pays huge, huge attention to what’s going on in the post when it comes to engagement, likes, comments, shares.

08:43
KILEY: Yeah, absolutely. I think that too, there are so many people that we talk to that kind of ignore analytics, right? And I don’t think it’s necessarily something that takes that much effort that it’s justified to ignore it. You know what I mean. I know Lori, for a lot of our clients, we do monthly analytics reporting for each of our clients, and I know Lori, for the ones that she’s super involved in—I would probably actually say, for most of our clients, you’re in there looking every single day.

LORI: I know, I can’t help myself.

KILEY: Right, which is, I mean, it’s, you know, you see so many brands that are completely ignoring their analytics altogether, right? When you’d rather just be in there every day seeing how the day before went?

LORI: It’s not hard.

10:21
KILEY: Exactly, it’s all you have to do is log into your accounts and take a little peek, even, even if it’s once a week, even if you’re just looking month over month at that monthly report that is so easy in every platform to view. I think it’s really important, despite the fact, again, that I’ll say it, that your analytics aren’t a direct signal to ROI. It is so important to get that ROI. That your content is interesting, right? Because if you have really, really poor numbers in your analytics, that ROI is significantly less likely. So, while they’re not directly correlated, one can signal that the other is possible. I think is—I don’t know if that made sense when I said it.

LORI: Absolutely, yes. Your analytics reporting. Yep.

10:23
KILEY: Yes. If you’re seeing dismal results on your social media, you’re not going to see ROI. However, you could be seeing really, really positive analytics and still not seeing that ROI. So that’s where it’s really important to get into because, you know, you could see, you know, in this month, I’ll go back to our dental clients. We did a ton of smile reveals and a ton of before and afters, and our leads skyrocketed. And then the following month, we did less smile reveals and less before and afters, but a lot of, like, still images of our doctors and our team and things like that.

11:01
And our engagement was really high, but we didn’t have any leads. Yeah, right, yep. If you’re not getting the leads, it doesn’t really matter how high your engagement is. So it’s really important to really look between the lines. I think it’s a good way to put that at—okay, yeah, our engagement’s high, but are we getting the desired outcome, right? So to kind of compare the two and understand that high engagement or high clicks or whatever is not necessarily a direct indicator that you’re seeing that ROI, but you don’t know that if you’re not looking, right? You don’t know how anything’s going if you’re not paying attention, absolutely.

11:39
LORI: And I would also add that your analytics can help you determine the best type of content to create moving forward. So we have a couple of different tools. We’ve used Loomly, we’ve used—I use Hootsuite for one client, we use Statusbrew for most of our clients, and you are able to go in there every month and see the top three performing posts. What are the top performing, and those posts are going to tell you that you need to do more of those types of content, right?

12:14
And the other thing is, you can use your numbers to test and learn. Does your audience prefer this type of call to action, or that type of call to action, can you just say, “Learn more,” or does that get you nothing? And if you say, “See how this works,” and put the link, that maybe performs better. So another reason to pay attention to those analytics is so that you can optimize your content, and that’s really the key to driving ROI. So analytics allow you to optimize, which helps you deliver the results you want. So with that, that seems like the perfect place to end. Yeah, right, so that’s how we do it anyway.

12:57
So again, Lori Jo Vest, Kiley Metcalfe, we are two members of the team at PopSpeed Digital Marketing. We help our clients with social, email, website development, SEO, content, and we love what we do. We’re the most enthusiastic people in the room. We are opening the curtain. Here’s how we do it. Here’s what works for us in hopes of spreading the good word about social media. If we can help you with your social, get in touch with us. Both of us are on LinkedIn. We’re open networkers, and we would love to hear from you. So with that, take care, guys.

KILEY: Bye, everybody.