Social media is inherently fuzzy – especially if you want to measure results. There's a bevy of tools to measure activity and reputation, but not much talk about concrete ROI. Some would argue that you can't expect direct conversions from social campaigns, and to an extent I would agree. But your time is worth something. And common sense says that if you invest too much time on social media, you’re bound to see diminishing returns. So how do you know when your time is well spent?

The obvious answer is to measure the traffic that’s referred to your Web site by social media sites, but that brings up another fuzzy problem. With the use of third-party applications like TweetDeck, you can’t trust the "top referrers" in your Web analytics software to see all the social traffic.

Luckily, the answer lies in a tool you probably already use – a URL shortener. Some URL shortening tools, such as http://bit.ly/, actually provide click-through metrics as part of the service. This is a great start, but it still won’t tell you what those visitors do once they arrive on your site.

The key is to add tracking parameters to your URL before shortening it. For example, if the URL for this blog post is:

http://www.lyrishq.com/index.php/Blog/Concrete-Results-from-Social-Media.html

I might enter this link in the URL shortener instead:

http://www.lyrishq.com/index.php/Blog/Concrete-Results-from-Social-Media.html?source=social

Or I could use separate links for different social platforms like this:

http://www.lyrishq.com/index.php/Blog/Concrete-Results-from-Social-Media.html?source=twitter

Then, I would look for visitors with "source=twitter" in my Web analytics data. With Lyris HQ, there’s nothing special about "source" – you can call it anything you want. If you use Google Analytics, however, you’ll need to use their URL builder to assign UTM parameters.

In Lyris HQ, I would set up a custom Data Dissection Report based on the "source" parameter. The resulting report might look something like this (but with bigger numbers):

                                       (click on image to view full size)

This allows you to track social results in terms of goals and conversions. Of course, you’re likely to be underwhelmed by your results if you only look at conversions. You should also keep an eye on site engagement metrics like Average Time on Site and Page Views per Visit. Tracking parameters are the key to measuring online marketing campaign effectiveness, and shortened URLs are a great way to keep them "hidden" in social media.

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About the Author

Dan Miller is professional services and sales engineering manager at Lyris. He helps companies adopt data driven marketing techniques to improve their ROI.

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