Social media has become an essential marketing channel for businesses. With that being said, it’s also become imperative to understand how your social media activity is performing. Learning from industry leaders is one way of seeing how it is done.
MediaLeaders launched a successful month-long campaign for the Palms Hotel to track their social media activity end to end. By tracking room bookings back to individual social messages, MediaLeaders was able to expand the social media presence of the hotel while still demonstrating the value of their social media activity. Using Hootsuite and Google Analytics, MediaLeaders was able to track the path of revenue from a social message.
“Before you begin a social campaign, it’s important to set up a measurement strategy. This way you can proactively measure success and quickly see the impact of your campaign on your business’ ROI.” – Marc Chaix, Senior Web Intelligence Analyst, Hootsuite
To understand how to set up a campaign like the Palms Hotel campaign which tracks the revenue of a single message, we have outlined the 5 steps to setting up a tracking campaign.
To learn how to set your campaign goals and build your marketing plan, check out this blog post. Find out how to set your goals up in Google Analytics by reading this blog post.
How MediaLeaders implemented those steps:
1. Set your goal and make a plan→
In this case The Palms Hotel wanted to know if website traffic referral from social media converted into a sale. The goal of this campaign was to show the simplicity of driving conversion and tracking revenue from social media using Hootsuite custom URL parameters and Google Analytics.”
2. Add Google Analytics to Hootsuite by following these steps.
3. Set up tracking codes
→ The MediaLeaders team created campaign-specific Hootsuite custom URL parameters for each social network. Every message sent from Hootsuite on behalf of the Palms Hotel was equipped with these parameters, which books a hotel room, that social sale is directly attributed to the campaign and the source they came from.
For the Palms Hotel, their custom URL parameters differentiated the source and grouped the links together under specific campaigns. From this information, you can track and monitor metrics such as: site behavior, time spent on the site, conversion rates, Ecommerce.
4. Shorten your links and make social posts through Hootsuite
5. Once the campaign is complete, check Hootsuite and Google Analytics.
In this case they not only tracked metrics such as increase in follower growth and engagement, but also measured the dollar value of each social message by showing the path of conversion. In the end, a simple Facebook message (“Psst… who wants $55 rooms?”) with an image of the Las Vegas hotel generated $903 in revenue from three transactions.