How to Measure Social Media ROI with Hootsuite

Posting great content is only half the battle, knowing if it’s actually growing your business is where the real work begins. Proving that your time, energy, and budget spent on social media are delivering real, tangible results can feel daunting, but it's essential for smart marketing. This guide will walk you through exactly how to measure your social media ROI using Hootsuite's tools, from setting clear goals to building a report that actually means something.

First, What Is Social Media ROI? (And Why It’s More Than Just Likes)

Before touching any reporting tools, it’s important to get grounded in what Return on Investment (ROI) actually is. In its simplest form, the formula is:

(Return – Investment) / Investment * 100% = ROI

Easy enough, right? The tricky part is defining "Return" and "Investment" in the context of social media.

Your Investment is the total cost of your social media efforts. Be thorough here. It includes:

• Tool Costs: Your Hootsuite subscription fee.
• Ad Spend: Any money you put behind boosted posts or social ads.
• Content Creation: Costs for graphic design, video editing, photography, or copywriting.
• Labor: The value of the time you or your team spends planning, creating, scheduling, and engaging on social media. (You can calculate this by multiplying the hours spent by the hourly rate of the employees involved).

Your Return is the total value generated from your social media activities. This is where many get stuck on vanity metrics like likes, shares, or follower count. While those can indicate brand health, they don’t directly represent ROI. A real return is tied to a tangible business objective. Returns can include:

• New leads generated
• Direct sales or new customers
• Email newsletter sign-ups
• App downloads
• Event registrations

Step 1: Set Clear, Measurable Goals Before You Open Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a powerful tool, but it's only as good as the strategy behind it. If you don't know what you’re trying to achieve, you can't measure it. Vague goals like "increase engagement" won't work. Your goals must be specific, measurable, and tied to business outcomes.

Start with a core business objective and work backward to create a corresponding social media goal.

Example 1: Driving Sales

• Business Objective: Increase Q4 online sales.
• Social Media Goal: Generate $10,000 in revenue directly from our Instagram campaign promoting the new fall collection.

Example 2: Generating Leads

• Business Objective: Get more qualified leads for the sales team.
• Social Media Goal: Drive 100 demo requests through LinkedIn posts about our latest case study this month.

Example 3: Building an Audience

• Business Objective: Grow our email marketing list to nurture potential customers.
• Social Media Goal: Get 500 new email subscribers from our free downloadable guide shared on Facebook and Twitter over the next 30 days.

Once you have a goal like one of these, you know exactly what to look for in your analytics. Now, let’s find the data inside Hootsuite.

Step 2: Track Your Goals with Hootsuite Analytics and UTMs

To connect your social media activity in Hootsuite to an action on your website (like a purchase or a form submission), you need to build a digital bridge. That bridge is made of UTM parameters.

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are short pieces of text added to the end of a URL that tell your analytics software - like Google Analytics - where a visitor came from.

Using Hootsuite's Built-In UTM Composer

Hootsuite makes adding UTMs easy directly from the content composer. You don't need to use a separate tool. Here’s how to do it:

1. Create Your Post: In the Hootsuite Composer, write your caption and add your media as you normally would.
2. Add Your Link: Paste the URL to your landing page, product page, or blog post into the caption.
3. Add Tracking: Below the text box, you'll see a link shortener option. Click "Add tracking" next to it.
4. Select Your Analytics System: Choose "Google Analytics." A box will appear allowing you to set up your UTM parameters.
   • Source: This is where the traffic is coming from. Hootsuite often auto-fills this with the social network (e.g., `facebook`, `linkedin`).
   • Medium: This defines the type of traffic. It’s almost always `social`.
   • Campaign: This is the most important part for ROI tracking. Give your campaign a clear name, like `fall_promo_2024` or `webinar_signup_oct`.
5. Apply Parameters: Click "Apply." Hootsuite will create a shortened ow.ly link with all your tracking data embedded.

Now, when someone clicks that link, Google Analytics will record that the visit came from your "fall_promo_2024" campaign on Facebook. This is how you trace a sale all the way back to a specific social media post you scheduled in Hootsuite.

Step 3: Build a Custom ROI Report in Hootsuite

With your tracking in place, it's time to gather the data. Hootsuite Analytics provides robust reporting capabilities, but the key is to customize your report to focus on the information that truly matters for your ROI goals.

Navigating to Hootsuite Analytics

Start by clicking the chart icon on the left-hand navigation bar to open the Analytics dashboard. From here, you can review existing reports or create a new one.

How to Build a Report Tailored for ROI

1. Click "New report" at the top of the Analytics dashboard.
2. Hootsuite offers several templates. A good starting point is the "Post performance" template, but for true ROI tracking, we recommend selecting "Build a custom report" to have full control.
3. You'll be presented with a blank canvas and a library of "widgets" on the right. Each widget represents a different metric. Drag and drop the ones that align with your goals onto your report.

Key Widgets to Include for ROI Analysis

Don't get distracted by the dozens of available metrics. Focus on the ones that tie back to your goals from Step 1:

• Reach and Impressions: great for awareness goals. If your goal has an associated brand value, this helps you understand the scale of your message.
• Link Clicks: This is a direct indicator of interest. It shows how many people took the first step toward converting after seeing your post.
• Engagement Rate: While not a direct ROI metric, a high engagement rate often correlates with higher reach and clicks. It tells you if your content is resonating, which is a leading indicator of performance.
• Conversions: Hootsuite has some direct conversion tracking capabilities, particularly for Shopify or for ad campaigns. If you're using these, the "Conversions" widget is powerful. However, for most organic posts, you will get this data from Google Analytics.

Your goal is to build a dashboard that shows the top-of-funnel metrics from Hootsuite (clicks, reach) alongside the conversion data you've gathered from Google Analytics thanks to your UTM tracking.

Step 4: Putting a Dollar Value on Your Actions and Calculating Your Final ROI

This is where you bring everything together. You have your "Investment" amount, and you've tracked your "Return" via UTMs and analytics. Now you just have to do the math.

To do this accurately, you need to assign a monetary value to your conversion goals.

Here are a few common models:

• Lifetime Value (LTV): What is the average amount a new customer spends with your business over their entire relationship with you? If a new customer is worth $1,000, and your campaign brought in 5 new customers, your return is $5,000.
• Average Order Value (AOV): If a typical sale from a social media referral is $75, and your campaign produced 20 sales, your return is $1,500.
• Lead Value: If your sales team closes 10% of leads generated from social, and each closed deal is worth $2,000, then each lead is worth $200 (10% of $2,000). If you generated 30 leads, that’s a return of $6,000.

An Example Calculation

Let's use our fictitious "fall_promo_2024" campaign.

Investment:

• Hootsuite Plan (portion): $50
• Team Time (5 hours @ $30/hr): $150
• Ad Spend: $300
• Total Investment: $500

Return:

• Your UTM tags in Google Analytics show that the campaign generated 15 sales.
• Your average order value from this campaign was $60.
• Total revenue: 15 sales * $60/sale = $900
• Total Return: $900

Calculate ROI:

($900 Return - $500 Investment) / $500 Investment = 0.8
0.8 * 100% = 80% ROI

For every dollar you put into this campaign, you made it back *plus* another 80 cents. Now you have a concrete number to show your team or clients, proving the value of your social media strategy and giving you the data to decide where to invest your budget next quarter.

Final Thoughts

Measuring social media ROI in Hootsuite is not about glancing at a single number on a precanned dashboard. It’s an active process of setting clear business goals, systematically tracking the actions your content inspires, and assigning a real dollar value to those outcomes to understand your true return.

While various tools offer ways to track performance, we've found that getting a clear view of what’s working shouldn't feel overly complex. At Postbase, we built our analytics dashboard to show you the insights that actually guide better content decisions, without overwhelming you with data or locking essential reports behind expensive plans. If you're looking for a simpler, more intuitive way to measure performance and grow your brand, we hope you'll appreciate our clean, modern approach to social media management.