Maximize your social strategy with Advanced Analytics

Learn how to use the advanced reporting capabilities to get insight into your social return on investment (ROI) with Hootsuite Advanced Analytics.

Know your overall business goals

When reporting on social ROI, you’ll want to first review your overall business goals so that you can tie these back to your social account activity. Taking this step will help you define the key performance metrics you want to track and improve for each account.

For example, one of your business goals may be to increase sales leads for your established North American markets. For your newer European markets, your business goals may be more focused on establishing a presence in the market. So your North American social strategy might be focused on driving conversion metrics, such as completed Google or Adobe goals. For your European social strategy, you might focus more on brand awareness and engagement metrics, such as impressions and likes.

Many metrics in Analytics are mapped against a basic customer journey through a typical marketing funnel. For detailed information on metrics, see Metrics in Analytics.

Customer journey stages

• Affinity - How does your audience feel about your content?
• Awareness - How much of your audience is your content reaching?
• Consumption - How much of your content is your audience consuming?
• Conversation - How much is your audience engaging with your content?
• Intent or conversion - Is your content driving conversions on your website?

Customize Analytics for your business needs

You can customize Advanced Analytics in two ways:

• Create custom metrics - Advanced Analytics includes metrics for both organic and ad accounts, as well as the option to customize existing metrics based on your needs.
  
  This customization capability makes it easy for you to report on the things that matter to your business. For example, if you want to capture a custom post-level engagement rate that includes only comments and shares, you can create this metric in Advanced Analytics. Learn how to create a custom metric.
  
  
• Set up custom ROI metrics profiles - In the ROI Analysis view, ROI metrics profiles help you measure and report on your social ROI for each social post, each social account, and all social accounts combined. With custom ROI metrics profiles, you can define the metrics that you want to track and analyze for each social account, in a weighted manner, with the help of your Hootsuite representative.
  
  For example, if you want to drive brand awareness for your new French Facebook Page, your metrics would likely be top-of-funnel metrics, such as impressions, reach, and likes. If you consider likes to be more valuable for driving brand awareness, you might have the likes metric equal 3 points per like and the impressions metric only 1 point per impression collected.

Prove your social ROI using web attribution

Plan ahead and use link tracking settings to associate a unique post ID with each of your social posts. For organic posts, you can set this up through Hootsuite. For ads, you must set up link tracking directly within your social network ad account. Using post IDs allows you to connect web conversion data, such as a completed Google or Adobe goal, to your social post. It also helps attribute activities like purchases or requests for sales demos to your social efforts.

You can also use web attribution data on a post level, combined with filters and sorting options, to understand which posts and social accounts are driving the most conversions for your business, such as page views, sign-ups, or downloads. You can then use this information to drive future social strategy.

Analyze your data on a deeper level with customized auto-tagging

Automatically adding tags to your posts makes segmenting and analyzing post-level social data easier. With the help of your Hootsuite representative and preconfigured rules, you can use customized auto-tagging on your organic and paid social posts.

For example, if you wanted to track engagement across all organic and paid posts for your healthcare business that include the keyword “research,” you could use preconfigured rules to identify all applicable posts and auto-tag them with a “Research” label. You could then group and analyze posts by this label, allowing you to more efficiently identify the parts of your strategy that are performing best.

Monitor your social performance and gain insight into your overall social strategy

If you’ve ever wondered which of your social accounts has the highest follower count, or which of your regional brands leads in terms of brand awareness or community engagement, you can use reports to see this data. You can combine multiple metrics and social accounts into segments, across all social networks, and view them in one chart.

To bring all of your Advanced Analytics data together, you’ll want to report on your overall social ROI. The social metrics you report on will likely be tied back to the social goals for your social accounts (such as brand awareness), which in turn feed into your business goals for a product, service, or industry (such as increasing market presence).

When reporting on your social ROI, you’ll want to consider your internal audience’s goals and interests. For example, an executive-level report might provide an overview of your social efforts and successes, whereas a report for social and marketing teams will likely include more in-depth insights.

You can create reports in a few places. Here are some common and recommended use cases for creating reports:

• Track campaign performance - Advertising performance
• High-level social ROI overview - Hootsuite Analytics (Page-level scheduled export)
• Social-network-specific in-depth report - Hootsuite Analytics (Page-level scheduled export)