The folly of click data The world loves free

Unless your company ponies up for enterprise level social media management software, you’re left to use free or low cost platforms that offer little more than click tracking data. But it’s all you have, so you use the data to develop and manage your ongoing social media strategy. The problem is, once you upgrade to a social media monitoring platform that includes conversion tracking, you begin to see a very different world. A world where not all clicks are created equal. especially free — data, insight, helpful tips, etc. Thus, when you’re creating and sharing helpful content, people click on it. Many content marketers mistake this click for need when often, it’s simply an indicator of interest.

let’s say you post a lot of content philippines photo editor around B2B digital sales & marketing strategy and consistently see good click-thru numbers on those links. Specifically, you may see a lot of clicks from inside certain LinkedIn Groups that focus on B2B sales & marketing. Because of this, you assume those groups want and need advice about developing B2B sales & marketing strategies — something you do. So you devote more time to those groups beyond just posting your content. You monitor the Daily Update emails, you participate in various discussions and begin to connect with other members. Meanwhile, you’re not seeing as many clicks from another platform — let’s say Facebook — so you dial down the time you spend there to focus more attention to those click happy LinkedIn Groups that seem to love your content. But you have a big problem.


You don’t really know if the social media activity is converting to new leads, downloads or subscriptions, or if you’re just helping educate a lot of people that will never do business with you. Turning links into leads The missing link (pun intended) here is conversion tracking. It’s not enough to use Google Analytics to determine that your social and content efforts are driving traffic to your website, you need to define the high quality from low quality traffic. The only way to do that is by tracking conversions. For every social media post you make, you need to understand how many clicks and conversions (downloading a white paper, subscribing to a newsletter, or buying a product) were generated.