Social Media Metrics for Ad Agency New Business

This simple statement speaks volumes to the ad industry, your agency’s promotional efforts and advertising for clients.

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”
Lord Kelvin

One of the reasons social media is growing in popularity is that it is more measurable than traditional media. That is especially important in this down economy.  I am able to measure and improve upon my social media communications at incredible speed. Here are a few things that I am measuring which enables me to better reach my goals and objectives:

  • My blog analytics. I check them up to ten times a day. Beyond page views here are just a few of the things I am able to know: what posts are the most popular, how many unique visitors I’ve had, direct traffic and referred traffic, where referred traffic came from, where people who read my blog are located, the average length of time someone was on my blog, etc. 
  • Blog Comparison Tools. There are a number of tools that are available that allow you to measure the power of your own blog. I happen to use Websitegrader. It provides me with a benchmark detailed report on how well my blog is performing. I can also enter any other blog URLs that I choose and receive a comparison report. I’m also part of Ad Age’s Power 150 marketing blog. When I initially subscribed my blog it ranked in the 900 range of marketing blogs. Within 10 months I was able to work my way into the top 400. My goal is to one day break into the top 150.
  • Email  Newsletters. I just sent one out yesterday with links back to my blog. Links to new and related blog posts. the post that I thought would generate the most traffic didn’t. I was able to test subject lines prior to mailing to my entire list. I’ve been able to determine what is the best day and time of day to email. what that help to drive new traffic to my blog, what readers are most interested in, other referring sights. 
  • Additional Social Media Tools. I can measure everything from Facebook, SlideShare presentations to LinkedIn. I even utilize a number of different metric tools to help improve upon my usage of Twitter, which by the way has become the leading traffic generator to my blog. I of course know how many people are following me on Twitter and how many I’m following but I also can use various tools to track the click throughs on my Twitter posts. I can measure my ranking in Twitter, the number of times a post has be retweeted, how my retweets rank compared to others. I know how I rank in Twitter, according to Twittergrader I have a grade of 99.91, I rank number two in Birmingham and number five overall in my state. The tool gives me a benchmark and helps me to improve.
  • Money and Time. The easy part is knowing how much money I’ve spent,  last year ($922) utilizing social media for new business. Social media doesn’t cost much, many of the tools are free but it is very time intensive, so I’ve started keeping up  with time to get a better pitcher of my ROI. 

twitter-grader-michael-gass

You’ll find plenty of helps online with suggestions on how to measure the various tools you use.  As you enlarge your online footprint you will need to customize your own metrics to help you reach your goals and objectives.

 

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Michael Gass, agency new business consultant, primarily to small and mid-size advertising agencies, utilizing both traditional and new media tools.

twitter / michaelgass

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About Michael Gass

Consultant | Trainer | Author | Speaker

Since 2007, he has been pioneering the use of social media, inbound and content marketing strategies specifically for agency new business.

He is the founder of Fuel Lines Business Development, LLC, a firm which provides business development training and consulting services to advertising, digital, media and PR agencies.

Comments

  1. Good list Michael. You might want to look at feedcompare.com too. It shows you comparisons between blogs on their number of RSS subscribers. Useful, because many blogs don’t publish their subscriber count.

  2. Thanks Jason and thanks for recommending feedcompare.com. I’ve been exploring this afternoon.

  3. This is good for starters. However, agencies need much more then this to be truly effective. The need to be able to see conversations across domains, sentiment and other metrics. ManoByte provide true Social Media Analytics for Agencies. Take a look at our tool. http://www.manobyte.com/SM2/Register.aspx

  4. I would add trendrr to that list
    (http://trendrr.com) structured data and feeds for most of the social web – easy mashups, exports etc…

  5. Great idea and nice post, im interested to see how badly my blog does on the AdAge list… maybe i should follow your lead and spend some time on it.

    http://thelostagency.wordpress.com

  6. What a helpful post. Glad to see you are doing so well.

  7. props on the website and twitter scores. i don’t know how you manage to put out so much great content but please keep it up.

    ~ jason

    —————————
    Art Director & Account Rep
    High Rock Studios

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