10 KPIs to Measure Your Social Media ROI

Written by Adelina Chelniciuc on August 9, 2011. Posted in Articles, KPI

Fact: businesses are concerned to measure their success in social media. The question is how they can do it. So, how important is to have hundreds or thousands of “likes” if these “likes” fail to engage beyond their initial subscription? So, social media ROI should be based on “interaction and engagement” as primary goal, could be increase sales, share of voice, brand sentiment and many other things but, it’s also important to measure, monitor and compare with other investments in order to be sure that your money is spent wisely.

How to calculate your Return on Investment:

ROI= [(Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment)/ Cost of Investment]*100

Another two formulas to calculate your profit are:

Gross Profit = Gross Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold [here’s an article that shows you how to calculate COGS]
Gross Profit = Gross Revenue * Profit Margin (the % of your revenue that is actually profit)

There are a lot of things you can measure about you social media efforts. The social media ROI is calculated based on the return and the investment using several KPIs. We have compiled a list of 10 KPIs to help you:

% Conversion rate – Measures the rate of visitors that take a certain desired action when visiting the website such as purchasing a product.
# Visitors per conversion – Measures the number of visitors who take a desired action on the website, such as downloading a file, making a purchase, donating money or signing for a cause.
# New customer on first visit ratio – Measures the likelihood of a new visitor becoming a new customer on their first visi (from social media vs. other channels).
# Visitor recency – Measures the amount of time that passes between sequential visits from the same visitor of the website.
# Visitor loyalty and recency – Measures the total number of site visitors who make constant and frequent visits on the site.
# Stickiness – Measures the attractiveness and quality of the site content by compiling a set of metrics such as frequency of visits, duration of visits and site reach.
# Page depth – Measures the number of pages that are viewed in average by site visitors during a session on the site.
% Subscription rate – Measures the percentage of visitors to the site who become registered users by subscribing in order to get access to additional content.
% Revenue from first time online customers – Measures the revenue generated from first time customers out of the total revenue generated by the website customers.
% Revenue from repeat online customers – Measures the revenue level generated from existing customers out of the total revenue generated by the website customers.