Measuring social media when you are not selling online

If your product is a savings account, a prescription medicine or an industrial contract, there is no checkout to attribute a post to. So social reporting drifts toward the numbers that are available rather than the ones that matter, and a finance director is asked to accept reach as an outcome.

They should not, and there are better numbers available.

Qualified enquiry volume, with the source attached

The only social metric that survives a budget review is how many real enquiries arrived and where they came from. That needs three things:

• A tracked destination per campaign, not one shared landing page
• A form or a WhatsApp entry point that records the source
• Somebody classifying enquiries as qualified or not, weekly

Without the third, the number is traffic wearing a suit.

Branded search volume

When social is working for a brand that does not sell online, the effect shows up as more people searching your name directly. It is slow, it is unglamorous, and it is the closest thing to a brand health metric that you can pull for free.

Track it monthly against campaign periods. A campaign that moved branded search did something real.

Share of voice against a named set

"We got 40,000 impressions" means nothing without a denominator. Pick four competitors, track the same metric across all five, and report your share of it. A falling share during a rising month is the kind of thing that only shows up this way.

Cost per qualified enquiry, by platform and by creative

Not cost per click. Cost per enquiry that your sales team agreed was real. Once that number exists per platform and per creative format, the budget conversation stops being about opinions.

Reach, impressions and engagement rate are diagnostics. They tell you why a number moved. They are not the number.

Instrumenting it

Most of this is a week of setup and then discipline.

1. One tracked destination per campaign, named consistently
2. Enquiry source captured at the point of capture, not inferred later
3. A weekly fifteen minute qualification pass with sales
4. One monthly report with the same four numbers, every month, unchanged

The last point is the one that gets dropped. A report whose metrics change every month cannot show a trend, which is usually why the metrics changed.