Measuring Social Media Success or ROI shouldn't be hard
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 7 years, or 2 years which seems more popularly accepted, you would be blind not to notice the impact social media and networking sites have had on society. Some say product purchasing decisions are slowly migrating from search to social, forgoing the researching and evaluating phases for instant gratification and credible influence. So why are online marketers finding it so hard to determine the net effect of their social marketing efforts on a handful of web 2.0 sites?
When a site just isn’t a referring domain…
How do you measure influence, or thought leadership, or even the loosely understood phantom metrics of engagement? And how can you commingle referring domains into an overarching SEO initiative, to attribute successes fairly amongst two similar, yet equally distinct disciplines?
Scour the internet and I challenge you to find a clear cut answer to any of those questions. Why? Because social sites aren’t just a referring domain in your web analytics solution. Emerging products claim to have the social media bucket figured out, but can only provide the lazy-marketers solution to a product manager’s version of what social media measurement should be.
Defining goals, KPI’s if you want to sound cool
Two schools of thought on this issue of course. One being the extremely granular micro-conversion counter, a realistic and simple “first step” approach to a complex problem made worse by multi-touch attribution theory. Simplified, it states the following:
“I put X amount of hours into my social media effort, spent Y amount of salaried dollars for a dedicated representative, and I can measure Z leads/revenue/orders/telephone calls. As a linear relationship, the combined time and money can be weighed against ROI, less any complex retention calculations.”
Simple, clean, and little cloudy logic to get in the way. At recent sessions at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose last month, the consensus was that marketers should start here, and try to figure out complex multi-touch attribution after establishing a few quick wins under their belts. Makes sense.
Wanna make your head hurt?
The next step that is quite difficult for many people to understand, or even explain in detail for those that have figured it out in their company, is multi-touch attribution analysis. Web analytics software is good enough today to help us weigh individual factors of a visitor’s overall experience on our site, and give credit where it’s due for things as detailed as barker box creative on a homepage.
Do we really need all that detail?
The web designer may thank you for pointing out they did a good job on that barker box, but who else will really care? That is where the problem starts to emerge, what works for one company won’t work for another. Heck, what works for one company might not even be reproducible within information silos of the same website!
To make matters worse, attribution gets even more complex with social media, because your visitor is now interacting with your brand outside of your site, and if you believe the pundits, those external interactions is what’s shaping a revolutionary change in influence pre-click.
It all comes down to who wants extra credit
If you want to start modeling a complex attribution scheme, start it off with every possible department that directly impacts a conversion. Obviously marketing if visitors come in on any type of advertising effort, content teams for creative viewed (possibly by section, page views per unique visitor, time spent, or funnel dropout), customer service/sales if conversions are completed offline.
Each group will need the following information:
- Obviously marketing wants to know which advertising channel worked the best
- Content teams need to know what message influenced visitors to convert, and what went into the product mix
- Sales needs to know what’s in it for them, notably commission, etc
- Customer service needs to know what was promised, when, and by whom, but also how far they can go to satisfy in the late goings of a conversion
We’re only talking attribution within your organization, what happens with multi-touch advertising, social interactions outside your site, and the introduction of social “clouds”? All of a sudden, you have prospects going to Twitter to get the low-down on your product/service, or asking around their friends. You might reward certain sites for saying good things about you, but how does that translate to the community at large? Do they still think you suck?
What’s left for marketing?
As a marketer, I’m sure you’re asking yourself, with all these pieces of the pie that need a slice of my ROI, what’s left over to go back into marketing? In an online marketer’s perfect world, no one would need a sales team, or customer service team, or a retention team, commission, discounts, etc.
Changing your mind about attribution is the first step. Online marketing is a team effort, regardless of the level of self-service your website claims to be. All of a sudden, your ROI will look worse, if you choose to share success events across the board your marketing conversion may drop, but in all likelihood your overall operations story will reflect truer numbers and healthier symbiosis.
As it relates to social, there is no cut and dry solution. The fact remains, if you aren’t out there tooting your own horn and making good with the community by engaging in relationship-building, you’re missing on participating at the ground-floor of what might become a significant shift in online longevity. Think SEO before it caught on…
