Be patient when assessing cost of customer acquisition and ROI, although a few trend lines in your metrics might give you pause:
- Traffic to a social media service never picks up or falls and remains low after an initial burst.
- Traffic to the social media site holds steady, but the CTR to your master hub or other sites is low.
- Follow-through on intermediate calls to action is low in performance metrics.
- Traffic and click-throughs increase, but the leads aren't well qualified.
- Traffic and engagement, which had been increasing for quite a while, fall and continue to fall; small dips and rises are natural.
- A conversion rate tracked back to a social media service is unintentionally lower than from other sources, and average sales value is lower. (Good strategic reasons for these results might exist, of course. You might deliberately target the younger student audience on Yelp with less-expensive options than those offered to an older, more affluent audience on Facebook.)
- The cost of customer or lead acquisition is much higher than for other channels, making the ROI unattractive. For example, a high-maintenance blog may generate a few leads but be relatively expensive compared to prescheduled tweets that drive more traffic successfully.