Which Social & Mobile Metrics Should You Be Paying Attention To?

Making sure that the numbers you’re paying attention to are the ones necessitated by your objective can be the biggest step to success, according to Gartner managing vice president Julie Hopkins and mobile marketing lead Mike McGwire. Hopkins and McGuire talked about what marketers should be focusing on in a presentation, Better Insights and Action From Mobile and Social Investments, at the Gartner Digital Marketing Conference in San Diego, Calif.

The duo acknowledged that there’s a gap when marketers try to prove worth to C-level executives. It’s still sometimes difficult to prove hard ROI from social or mobile campaigns, McGuire said. He noted that marketers can measure the impact of mobile and social investment against three ROI tenets: revenue generation, cost reduction and risk.

So what should marketers track to prove the worth of a campaign? On social, McGuire and Hopkins recommend reach metrics such as impressions and brand mentions, engagement metrics such as clicks, likes, shares, views, comments and reblogs, and conversion metrics. However, they noted that only some of these analytics will be helpful.

The main way to glean real insight from analytics is to tie it back to the objective. They developed a script marketers can fill in, ad libs style, to figure out what they’re really looking for:

Through our efforts to engage ____(name of customer or prospect group)____ on ____(network)____using content like ____(whitepapers/videos/discussion groups)____, we will be able to _____(anticipated result)____, which will be indicated by a change in ____(metric)____.

Wondering which metrics are best for each goal you may have? Here’s a handy table:

Readers: How do you prove the worth of your social campaigns to C-level executives?