Social media has become more important to a business’s success. Measuring your conversion rate is the best way to see where your business stands. Here we will discuss how to measure your conversion rate and the best ways for you to grow your conversions.
Table of Contents
What Is Conversion Rate?
A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website or social media profile that have completed a desired goal, the conversion, out of the total number of visitors. The desired action could be filling out a form, completing a purchase, etc. Having a high conversion rate is indicative of successful marketing and web design. It means that people are interested in what your business has to offer and they are able to easily get it.
Different Types of Conversions
One of the best methods of assessing that conversion rate is to segment how you track social media metrics and divide them into four groups:
- Consumability
- Shareability
- Lead generation
- Sales
Consumability
Consumability is a fairly simple concept. It takes a closer look at your posts and content, then decides how consumable it was for your audience. It evaluates metrics like how many people in your audience looked at your content. This also applies to things like your pages, videos, and overall downloads.
Shareability
Shareability is a great way to measure the impact of the content that your audience consumed. The idea of shareability is based around measuring whether or not the content or posts were engaging enough to share with others on social media. If you’re looking to see if your content has shareability, ask questions such as: Was the content liked or shared? Did you receive some inbound links as a result of the social media post?
Lead Generation
Lead generation is another element to consider with conversions. The objective of this type of conversion tracking is to determine whether the content consumed by your audience created a lead you could then follow up on. You can track this through data sets like email and blog subscriptions. It can also be tracked through blog comments that are connected to your social media posts.
Sales
This metric is the most natural measurement of tracking conversions, as it’s defined by its name. It is how much money you made as a result of posting a piece of content on your social media accounts. You can measure this metric through your e-commerce system or offline sales activity, but you will need to create trackable calls to action (CTAs) on each post in order for this to happen.
How to Measure Social Media Conversion Rate
Conversion rates are not always the true measure of success for a social campaign, but it’s an essential tool for tracking performance nonetheless. However, the ability to accurately calculate your conversion rate is directly tied to your ability to directly track conversions. You can track conversions directly inside many of the most popular advertising and analytics platforms. With all of the possible conversions and platforms out there, the ability to implement conversion tracking is just one of many powerful social media techniques your business needs. Some big-name platforms that can be used are Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads.
A big reason why tracking your conversion rate is important is because then you can see how different aspects of your social media campaigns are working with your audience. Having the best possible understanding of how your social media campaigns are interacting with your audience will allow for those campaigns to be as successful as possible. A high conversion rate indicates that your content is compelling and valuable to your target audience. Here are the steps you can take to track your social media conversion rate:
- Create a post with a call-to-action link. Use a URL shortener to make it trackable.
- Place a “cookie” on the user’s machine. Doing so attaches the lead to a campaign.
- Track the total number of clicks and conversions generated by the post with your campaign tracking.
- Divide the conversions by total clicks, then multiply by 100 to determine your conversion rate percentage.
Additional Conversion Measurements
Social media metrics represent an opportunity to demonstrate the value of your content and the direct impact it has on your company. There are multiple ways to measure your conversions and different things to take into account when looking into the numbers of your social media.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
Cost-per-click (CPC) is the cost per individual click on your sponsored social media post. Whether you choose to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, it is important to focus on your CPC rather than total spend as the metric for success or failure. Your CPC will help you determine if your investment in attention is efficient or wasteful.
Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
Cost per thousand Impressions, or CPM, is the amount you pay every time one thousand people scroll past your sponsored social media post. Unlike that of a CPC campaign, CPM posts won’t necessarily create action. They are more aimed at creating impressions and views. Therefore, it can be faster and less expensive to split test your content or partner with an influencer marketing agency to drive mass viewership.
How to Increase Your Conversion Rate
Now that you have an understanding of how to measure and track your social media conversion rate, it’s important to know how to increase your conversions. Here are five tips to boost your social media conversion rate.
Make Your Landing Pages Seamless and Mobile-Friendly
With mobile e-commerce on the rise, the need for brands to appeal to customers on-the-go is a no brainer. A brand’s ability to win over buyers via social media comes down to creating a seamless experience. Think about how users navigate social media platforms like Instagram, swiping and tapping as they move from point A to point B. Your social media landing pages should follow the same principles. In other words, they should be easy to navigate with minimal interruption.
To begin with, social media landing pages shouldn’t be hidden to customers. When your customer or audience clicks on your landing page, it should be clear that it is optimized with your social media conversion rate in mind. Part of that is having swipeable and scrollable content, bright buttons to pull your audience in, and ensuring that mobile shoppers aren’t being treated as a second thought. Whether you’re promoting offers on Instagram, Facebook, or anywhere in between, having a mobile-friendly landing page is a game-changer. Not only can you appeal specifically to mobile consumers, but also better assess the behavior of your shoppers from your social media pages. To further improve your social media conversion strategy, you can continuously split test your social landing pages and optimize them over time. Tools such as Optimizely allow you to test different elements such as imagery, copy, and link placement to maximize conversions.
Get More Eyes on Your Promotions Via Video
Product-related videos go hand in hand with a higher social media conversion rate. Videos do two things: show off your products in action and catch the eyes of potential customers on social media. It is important to remember that video ads and content don’t need to be massive, big-budget productions. It’s about creating content that will catch your customers’ eyes and get them to stop scrolling and engage with your socials. Integrating video content in any shape or form is crucial for your organic content on your social media pages. Whether it’s mini-commercials or creative product displays, video should be central to your social media conversion strategy.
Include Compelling Calls to Action
Sometimes increasing your social media conversion rate means making small tweaks to your profiles and captions. Asking for followers to check out your recent promotions is great, as long as you’re tactful about it, such as posting an Instagram story to subtly encourage engagement with your calls to action.
Split Test Your Social Posts
Just like any sort of marketing metric, analyzing your social media conversion rate means looking at your data. For example, do you know what types of content score the most engagement, clicks, and traffic to your website? By understanding your posts by the numbers, you can adjust your content strategy to align with your social media conversion strategy.
Increasing your conversion rate means playing the long game of analyzing and optimizing. Tools such as Sprout can help speed up the process of experimenting with different types of content on your social media platforms to see what works. For example, Sprout’s social analytics can help you understand what your top-performing posts are across all networks. Sprout’s reports include everything from your best hashtags to behavioral trends among your followers. Based on these numbers, you have the ability to better determine what content is resulting in engagement. Websites and tools such as ViralPost enable you to schedule individual posts based on when they’ll receive maximum engagement. By regularly looking at your analytics, you can split test your organic campaigns to figure out which posts are most poised for engagement.
Be Consistent With Your Branding
As prospects and leads come through, there shouldn’t be any second-guessing as to where they’re coming from. Creative elements such as your tone, imagery, and color scheme need to be consistent as your customers approach the point of purchase. Although this may not seem to be a matter of importance, changing the creativity behind your social media can be disorienting to your followers.
FAQ:
- What is conversion rate?
- What are the different types of conversions?
- How do you measure social media conversion rate?
- What is cost-per-click?
- How can you boost social media conversions?
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