The ability to measure the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign is as crucial as running the campaign itself.  Without measuring the impact of your online marketing, you can’t know what works or what doesn’t work. Measuring gives you insights to know where to put more effort and money. I’ve specialized in online marketing for the last five years and I wish to share some important tools that I find useful for social listening and analytics.

1. SproutSocial is probably the most useful social media management and analytics tool I’ve come across. I like it and highly recommend it. It helps you to:
   1. Measure the impact of your campaigns on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
   2. Manage your social sites in one dashboard, no need to switch from one application to the other.
   3. Schedule posts
   4. Track the response rate and response time for customer queries.
   5. Monitor brand or competitor keywords and share of voice.
   6. I recommend you use the free trial version for 30 days and decide whether to purchase it.
2. Google Analytics. Probably the most important tool for measuring the traffic on a website. It will show you the source of referrals, the conversion rate, the kind of audience who visit your site and their behaviour. These kinds of insights help you know where you could make improvements. You must embed the Google Analytics script on your website for it to track it. A good alternative to Google Analytics is Statcounter  which is preferred by many SEO specialists.
3. Twitter Analytics: This is best for measuring the impact of your Tweets, engagements and shows the number of impressions created. Twitter analytics will show you the following about your followers: Interests, Location, Gender and user growth.
4. Socialbakers is a must-have social media analytics tool for analyzing, benchmarking and reporting your results in one powerful dashboard. The only downside to Social bakers is the pricing.
5. Keyhole: Has visual graphics and is good for measuring impressions for hashtags on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
6. Facebook Insights. Facebook has useful metrics like demographics, reach and engagement. You can also get comparative data for your brand against competitors.
7. Twitonomy: A very useful tool for getting Twitter insights such as Hashtags, influential users, mentions, retweets and lists. Tweet reach and Tweetcounter are also useful for measuring hashtags and follower growth respectively.
8. Bitly: Is a URL shortener and helps you measure clicks for shared links and reveals the source of referrals.  Goo.gl is an alternative to Bitly.  
9. Topsy: Gives you a comparative Analysis of Mentions on Twitter. It also includes the ability to track the geography of users who interact with your content, measure your content’s reach and exposure, and even observe metrics across web domains, including Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest.
10. Radian6: A premium service for online monitoring and analytics. It is the best online listening and engagement tool I have ever used. Radian6 tracks all mentions of keywords anywhere in the world and one can carry out the sentiment and competitive analysis to get the bigger picture. They give you a 30-day trial version for you to review.

Let me remind you that it is important that you only track the key KPI’s and include visual graphics in your reports.

Are there other tools you like,  Let me know. Leave your comments here.   Interact, Follow me on Twitter. Write me an email:  [email protected]

By Francis Waithaka: CEO and Founder, Digital 4 Africa.