1.4 Introduction to Data analytics : Sample project
Title: Analyzing the Impact of Social Media Marketing on Sales
Overview: In this project, we used data analytics to understand the relationship between social media marketing efforts and sales at an online retailer. We collected data on social media engagement, ad spend, and sales over a six-month period and used SQL and Excel to analyze the data.
Data table:
| Date | Impressions | Engagements | Ad Spend | Sales |
| 2020-01-01 | 10,000 | 1,000 | 500 | 2,000 |
| 2020-01-02 | 15,000 | 1,500 | 750 | 3,000 |
| 2020-01-03 | 20,000 | 2,000 | 1,000 | 4,000 |
| … | … | … | … | … |
SQL query:
SELECT CAST(Date as DATE) as Date,
SUM(Impressions) as Total_Impressions,
SUM(Engagements) as Total_Engagements,
SUM(Ad_Spend) as Total_Ad_Spend,
SUM(Sales) as Total_Sales
FROM data
GROUP BY CAST(Date as DATE);This query sums the impressions, engagements, ad spend, and sales by date, allowing us to see how these metrics change over time.
Business metrics:
- Cost per impression: This metric measures how much we spend on social media marketing for each impression (view) of our ads. We can calculate this by dividing the total ad spend by the total impressions.
- Engagement rate: This metric measures the percentage of people who engage with our social media content (e.g. likes, comments, shares). We can calculate this by dividing the total engagements by the total impressions.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): This metric measures the profitability of our social media marketing efforts. We can calculate this by dividing the total sales by the total ad spend.
Key findings:
- We saw a strong correlation between ad spend and impressions, indicating that increasing our ad budget leads to more people seeing our ads.
- There was a weaker, but still significant, correlation between engagements and impressions, indicating that more people seeing our ads leads to more people engaging with our content.
- The ROAS was positive overall, indicating that our social media marketing efforts were profitable. However, we did see some variations in ROAS over time, suggesting that certain types of ads or targeting strategies may be more effective than others.
Based on these findings, we can conclude that social media marketing is a valuable channel for driving sales at our online retailer. We can also identify specific strategies and tactics that are most effective at driving conversions, and allocate our ad budget accordingly.