By Brenna Holmes, Deputy Director, Interactive Services, Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey

So, everyone wants to integrate their online communications. And everyone wants to be huge in social media. And everyone, of course, wants all of it to be trackable. But is it possible? Indeed it is!

If there’s a link, it can be tracked. And as I like to say “It’s Not Direct Marketing If You Can’t Track It!” (And even if there’s not a link, there’s a way to track it.)

This post is all about how you can integrate your social campaigns into your website AND make them trackable.

First off, you need to approach social media with the same diligence and attention to detail you use with your direct mail, email, and telemarketing programs.

You wouldn't invest in mailing a new acquisition package without detailed test panels and list selection criteria, right? It would be a colossal waste of money and would never fly. Just because social feels “free” doesn’t mean it is. Effective social media integration is time consuming, and unless your org is powered by volunteers, paying your employees costs money.

But by far, the hardest part about integrating social campaigns with your website is getting all the players involved to play nice and agree on the campaign’s goals. Once you’ve jumped this hurdle, consider yourself more than halfway home!

• Make a list of all your gatekeepers: Site homepage, campaign landing/subpages, the various social media profiles that will be used, email, etc.
• Decide on concrete goals for the campaign. There can be more than one per campaign, but make sure they are clear and achievable, even if some of them are “stretch” goals.
• Based on your goals, draft your strategic promotional plan and list out all your tactics and how’ll they’ll help you meet your goal(s)
  • Once you list these tactics you’ll start to see how you should be sourcing your links so that you can track by medium/channel/special promotions; make friends with Excel (you too Guite!)
  • All long URLs are happy to have unique sources added to the end of them and while different CRMs prefer different arguments, they’ll all look something like this: www.URL.org/subpage?src=YourSourceCodeHere
  • And with the magic that is URL Shortening you never have to worry about how long and ugly your sourced URL is again!

These source codes are immensely important, but they can be as simple as you see here “FBFans”. I’ll give you one guess what that stands for.

Depending on how detailed you’d like your tracking to be, you can use single words, short phrases, or even a version of your offline alphanumeric source codes. It’s all up to you, but be sure you write down your source logic beforehand so you and your teammates know how to decipher and attribute the leads or revenue that comes in with each source code.

• Once all this is done, assign your doers and build your timeline/production schedule.
  • Who is going to take point on what piece, when will the next check in be, and what should be accomplished by then.
• After your final check-in, you get to launch the campaign. Yay!

Then watch the data pour in. Constantly go back and re-check, retweet, re-post, encourage sharing, tweak ad copy and images, targeting and keyword buys...

Once you start getting data you want to do something with it right? Yup. So just how do you interpret all that data across your various platforms?

Since you built out your source logic beforehand, you defacto decided on what was important to your organization to track. This will be the basis of your reporting and the raw numbers of leads, downloads, donations, shares, clicks, views, etc will all be data in your algorithms based solely on what your GOALS where in first place.

Again, let Excel be your friend.

Since while all these fun new platforms come with their own super fun analytics and reporting pieces (i.e Facebook Insights, Facebook Ads, Bit.ly, Hootsuite Pro reporting, etc), I always come back to crunching raw numbers in Excel. (It’s the budget and stats geek in me, nothing I can do about it.)

Excel allows you to merge your data from across platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Email, your Website, YouTube, etc.) so you can look at your campaign results in aggregate and see the true value – and hopefully lift – that social media integration gives. You’ll be amazed at the trends and takeaways that surface when you start playing with Pivot Tables and charts. But please be careful when analyzing your reports. Connections do not equal causality. And directional guidance does not statistical validity make.

If you want more, feel free to reach out, post comments/questions, @ me, DM me, etc. And you can even get a full hour and a half of invaluable advice from me and my fantastic friends and clients Heather and Lauren at EDF by downloading the recorded webinar we did with NTEN.

Brenna Holmes, Senior Strategist & Account Exec., Interactive Services at Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey, has an extensive background in cross-channel marketing and advocacy integration, including online list growth with paid and earned media. Her specialty is in integrating traditional direct marketing with the social web and search engines to maximize supporter engagement and organizational loyalty.