I just encountered a question located on a post asking “how to evaluate Social Media marketing performance” and the question made me pause. Recently I wrote about AdWords and the need to analyze its performance and today I ran across that one question. I felt a slight sense of déjà vu since the topics are extremely similar and also fairly easy to figure out.
With all the tools we have today data collection should be easy so the problem isn’t with getting data. The problem stems from four things:
1) What question(s) do you want answered?
2) What type of data do you collect?
3) How do you collect the data?
4) How do you use the data once it’s collected?
Question one will often answer the other three. In addition, during the data collection process you will find other questions can be answered as well. Keep things simple and you will have answers before you know it.