You posted about the new collection. By the evening it had three hundred likes, forty comments and ten shares. The next day the phone rang as often as on any other day. Nothing arrived by email.
Did the post work or not?
The honest answer is that you do not know. And you do not know for a very simple reason: every number you saw was counted by the platform, and the platform only counts what happens inside it. Whatever happened next, on your site, on the phone, in the shop, it cannot see.
Four steps from the post to the customer
Between a post and a customer there are four steps:
- Someone saw the post.
- They clicked the link.
- They opened your site.
- They did something there: sent the form, tapped the phone number, placed an order.
The platform sees the first two clearly. Likes, comments and reach belong to the first. Link clicks belong to the second.
The third is not a given. A click does not mean the page opened. The person may have tapped by accident while scrolling with their thumb, or got tired of waiting and gone back before your site loaded. That is why Meta’s ad reports have two different numbers, link clicks and landing page views, and they usually differ.
The fourth step, the only one that pays the bills, the platform does not see at all. Your site sees it, if measurement is set up properly.
Why Analytics does not recognise the visitor from the post
Since your site has Google Analytics, you would expect to see a row there saying “came from Tuesday’s post”. You don’t, because visitors do not always bring with them the information of where they came from.
When someone clicks the link inside Facebook or Instagram, the site usually knows they came from there, and Analytics puts them in the “Organic Social” group. But it does not know whether they came from a particular post, from the profile link or from a comment. Everything goes into the same basket.
And if someone saw the post, copied the link and sent it to his wife on Viber, the visit often arrives with no sign at all of where it came from. Analytics then records it under “Direct”, the group which by Google’s definition means the visitor typed the address or had it bookmarked. Your post brought the customer, and in the numbers it looks as if it did nothing.
There is a way to know where they came from
You do not have to guess. Those who know how to set up a business’s social media properly prepare every link that goes up, in the profile, in posts, in stories, in ads, so that the site knows exactly where the visitor came from. Which network, which post, which ad. Even when someone forwarded it to a friend on Viber.
The visitor sees no difference. Your posts do not change. Only what you learn changes.
It does take order, though. Measurement is set up once, with rules that are followed on every link, every time. One small slip, a word written differently from last time, and the numbers scatter across several rows with none of them adding up. That is why it is work done properly from the start, not something fixed afterwards.
What you read at the end of the month
When measurement is set up this way, at the end of the month you see each campaign separately: how many came from the new collection post on Facebook, how many from the Instagram profile link, how many from the ad. And, more importantly, what they did next: how many sent the form, how many tapped the phone number, how many ordered.
This needs a little care. Analytics counts a “conversion” (GA4 now calls it a “key event”) wherever it was told to count one, and that is not always a customer. Tapping the phone number is not a call, clicking “Send” is not a form that arrived. Before you trust the numbers, run the check we described in “Analytics says «conversion». But did a customer arrive?”.
And look once a month, not every morning. In a small business a week’s numbers are small and jump up and down for no reason. If you change strategy with every jump, you will never learn what worked.
What no tool will ever show you
Now the part that usually gets forgotten.
Someone saw your post, clicked nothing, and dropped by the shop the next week. Someone else remembered it days later and searched for your name on Google. A third person just phoned you. For all of them the post did its job, and no tool will ever show it.
That is why there is a tool that costs nothing and does more than all the others together: the question “Where did you find us?”. On the phone, at the counter, as an optional field on the form. And write the answer down, in a notebook, in a spreadsheet, anywhere. After a month, the “from Instagram” column will tell you things that likes never will.
Likes are not worthless
We are not saying likes do not matter. They show what your audience likes, and that is useful for the next post. And an account that is alive, with people reacting, is more convincing than an empty one.
Just do not confuse them with sales. Likes are the first step. The customer is on the fourth. If your social media lead nowhere, as we wrote in the article on social media strategy, they are just nice pictures. With proper measurement and one question, you find out which pictures also bring in business.
This is what we set up: we prepare the links for your profile, posts and ads so you know where every visitor came from, check that Analytics counts your forms and phone taps correctly, and at the end of each month give you a simple picture of what brought visits and what brought enquiries. See what social media management includes, or send us through the form which networks you are on today.
