Analytics Expert

Social media is a powerful way for organizations to connect with passionate customers, prospects and website visitors. Too many social media programs, however, are implemented without a reliable process to quantify their impact on top- or bottom-line goals. How successful was a video in driving users to the site? What kind of comments are users posting about the products? Where did they see an ad but not click through? These, and questions like these, are often left unanswered. Some organizations do track impression and click performance, but do not tie the data to sales, conversion events, or other key performance indicators, which the social media program was designed (and funded) to influence.

Because of the decentralized nature of social media, marketers are overwhelmed with the thought of measuring program impact. In actuality, with the right planning and tools, social media measurement can be just as easy and accurate as traditional online media programs. And most importantly, once social media programs are accurately measured, resources can be devoted to the most impactful elements, while the least productive elements can be refined or discontinued.

Here are four tips to accurately measure social media programs and their impact on overall marketing activities:

Get a complete picture of program performance with a unified view of on-site and off-site data

Make sure to incorporate data from Twitter, Facebook, and blogs for a comprehensive perspective on how social media exposure drives your overall marketing. Visibility into the behavior of visitors who come into contact with your brands, products and campaigns while visiting third-party websites enriches your understanding of their preferences and helps recognize which types of marketing offers will better drive visitors to your website.

Understand the value of un-clicked marketing assets (view-through)

Often, a marketing asset influences a customer even when they don’t visit your website directly from the asset by clicking on it. To understand this indirect, yet important impact of un-clicked display ads, viral videos, widgets, and any other online media, capture analytics data about such exposures, and attribute it to subsequent behaviors and conversions that occur on your website. Once this impression-based attribution is established, you will be able to make more informed decisions about which social media sites are best suited for off-site display ads, widgets and videos.

See how video impacts results

Set a clear strategy before investing in video and make sure to implement tracking for video advertising before moving forward with a video program. Tracking makes it possible to get a clear picture of return on investment, while incorporating video metrics into a broader understanding of the success of your marketing programs.

Make sure your tracking program includes the ability to measure:

• Time viewers spent watching videos and view to completion
• What kind of video player was used
• How un-clicked videos impacted subsequent website conversions

Take advantage of user-generated content

Customer ratings, user feedback and other forms of user-generated content all have influence over the perception of products and services. Often, customers are looking to contribute this to a company’s site where the product information resides. Take advantage of the community voice to positively impact buying decisions. In addition to a ratings forum for products, implement a product recommendation strategy with features to prioritize “highest rated” or “most popular” items and let the community of customers become your sales force.

When implementing this system, make sure the product recommendation tool can:

• Match potential buyers with recommended products and services based on user feedback and category
• View the broader range of community ratings and feedback, including the number of ratings, likelihood to recommend and review syndication
• Incorporate behavior data about the individual visitor by looking at their historical website behavior

Once implemented, these tips for measuring social media programs will help determine where marketing dollars are most effective and what changes in content, message and message delivery mechanisms should be made. For more information about how Coremetrics can help your company measure social media, download our whitepaper on accurately measuring social media, available in the Coremetrics gallery.

Questions or feedback about measuring social media? Let me know in the comments below.