Attribution problems are likely the most significant barrier to social media ROI in the market today. The reality is that social media does a great job of starting the conversation, but many times it isn’t the “last” place someone searches before making a purchase. Therefore, there are several sales that social media influenced that go unappreciated.
Remarketing advertising offers an opportunity to segment social media users and display 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 different sources, it is integral that you take the time to set up your segments correctly and create a standard way of sharing links.
However, you can begin to better control this so that your custom segments are efficient if you have Google Analytics. Each 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 engrossed in 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 understand the ins and outs of how to do this, check out this tutorial from Google.
With the combination of Google URL Builder to simply 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:
- Do Twitter or Facebook followers convert more often on direct response ads for our products or services?
- Does remarketing with content marketing ads have a greater impact on social conversion than direct response ads?
- Are social media followers more likely to convert into email subscribers prior to purchasing or vice versa?
- Do remarketing ads that are aligned with the type of content in the link they originally clicked on more or less efficient in driving conversions?
Remarketing offers an incredible 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.
By Nichole Kelly
Originally posted on: www.socialmediaexplorer.com