In this “Chart of the Week” from Marketing Sherpa, only 7% of companies are confident social media is producing a positive ROI. The article says 7% is “outstanding” because social media is still so new. I respectfully disagree.

Social media is not new. Anything in digital marketing that has been “the rave” for two years is no longer new. I save “new” for the types of projects we don’t know about yet that will change our lives in the new decade.

Instead, I think this might be a classic “measurability” problem. Like I always say, “If you can’t measure it, it’s probably zero.” So I thought I’d share some tips & tricks for measuring social media without enormous budgets or expensive software.

We’ll start with the simplest way that requires no effort (assuming you have Google Analytics installed on your site. If you don’t, tisk tisk. Go here.)

Google Analytics – Referral Sources

The easiest way to measure the success of your social media program is to use the data that is gathered for you automatically. Google Analytics (GA) is smart enough to know where traffic comes from so if someone clicks a link to your site on Facebook, GA logs that visitor as a link that came from the Facebook domain. GA calls this the “Source” of the traffic. Continue