Social media platforms offer built-in analytics that provide insights on clicks, shares, and likes. Unfortunately, these built-in analytics are only accurate for action on the social page itself. What about traffic to your website? The truly valuable data points come from understanding how your target audience interacts with social content and your website. Seeing this traffic path will help answer what types of social content are most effective at both getting visitors to your website and making a visitor into a customer. Actively monitoring social media analytics is key to evaluating effectiveness in reaching your audience and ensuring return on investment (ROI). Both Facebook and Google Analytics offer relatively easy methods to start tracking your customer traffic path.
Facebook Pixel provides the ability to measure the results of Facebook ads, serve those ads to the right audiences of both past website visitors and new customers, and drive sales. It is a tool to help you recognize the behavior of website visitors and then determine the best strategy to reach your goals.
The pixel is a code, generated by Facebook, copied into the header section of your website. Once installed, you will receive insights on user demographics, traffic paths, and actions while visiting the site. These data points help with creating audiences and setting up bidding strategies for your ads. Audience creation can be customized as desired, with the functionality to create a lookalike audience of users who are most similar to your best existing customers. In turn, you can make decisions to run a campaign more efficiently, reaching people who are most likely to take action.
Google Analytics offers Campaign URL Builder, which adds tags to your web links to track the value of social marketing programs and campaigns. These tags, called Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters, give you the ability track campaign source, medium, name, term, and content to understand overall efficacy.
Once you’ve built your web link with UTM parameters included, the link can be shared on ads across any platform. Reports can then be generated for analysis to help enhance specific audiences and ad dollars spent by understanding the full circle of your ad traffic.
Both of these tools provide valuable data points to better understand your audience and create a strong communication strategy. Each tool can provide target audience demographic data on location, age, gender, and audience actions. Facebook Audience Insights also provides advanced audience detail, such as education level and job title. With this information, communication plans can be tailored to best align with your target audience in content, tone, and frequency. Let the data inform your decisions and evolve your marketing strategy!
