tracking social media roi with socialeye

Tracking and ROI with

Measuring and optimizing your return on social media marketing

SocialEye is a technology enabled service of:

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

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Social Media Performance and ROI Tracking with SocialEye™

Many marketers think they cannot track social media marketing ROI.It’s often presumed that social media is so novel that the old metrics no longer apply, or that the return on social media investment is uniquely difficult to quantify and track. This widespread perception is reflected by comments and statistics like these:

Figuring out the ROI of social media “is the million dollar question.”

--Director of Corporate Branding, Major Retailer 1

“The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.”

--Principal, Social Media Marketing Agency 2

Almost two-thirds of companies surveyed (61%) say their organizations are “poor” (34%) or “very poor” (27%) at measuring return on investment from social media.

Only a quarter of companies (24%) use sales as a metric for measuring social media success.

-- Econsultancy report 3

While most organization are increasing the amount of marketing resources they dedicate to social media, many think they cannot accurately track the ROI of social media marketing as they do with other online and offline marketing programs. The reality is that this perception is completely wrong – social media marketing can be tracked like everything else marketers do online with the same level of accuracy and accountability. The difference is that, unlike paid search, online media and other online marketing tactics, the social channel can take more time to mature and results can take longer to be realized.

Figuring out the ROI of social media “is the million dollar question.”

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


You can track social media ROI.Although viable social media channels may take longer to launch and mature than other forms of online marketing, return on social media marketing can be measured just as effectively as everything else marketers do online. You can track your social media performance and ROI using traditional online metrics as well as new measures that are specific to the social media landscape.

Social Media MetricsTo track the performance and ROI of your social media program, you can use reliable, meaningful metrics that fall into two broad categories.

1) Traditional Online Metrics: These are the tried and true metrics that marketers have long used to gauge the success of anything they do online (paid search, SEO, online advertising, etc.). These metrics typically come from your website, landing pages, CRM systems and call centers but could also come from places like your Facebook page if you use it for lead capture or transactions. These traditional online metrics can absolutely be applied to social media marketing and include:

o Traffic: clicks, visits, and page viewso Actions: retail location searches, coupon downloads and other valuable brand interactionso Conversions: data capture, lead capture and phone callso ROI: cost per click, cost per lead, sales and revenue

2) New Social Media Metrics: These are the performance indicators that occur in the social media landscape and on your social properties like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. These social platforms are extensions of your site, brand and content that live as channels and profiles on other sites but could still be considered your property. New Social Media Metrics are novel at first glance but have good analogs in tried and true online marketing metrics that you’ve used for years. New Social Media Metrics include:

o Connections: friends, fans (now one form of likes), subscribers, followers and application installs

o Views: social site page views, video plays, SlideShare plays, etc.o Engagement: likes, comments, sharing, retweets and other

interactionso Buzz: levels of chatter such as tweets, blog posts, forum posts,

comments, etc.o Reach: influence and reach of the people and bloggers posting the

chattero Context and Sentiment: subject matter and specific themes of

the buzz and the positive or negative opinion ratings of the views expressed

o Media Equivalent Value: what you would have paid if you had purchased through conventional online channels the impressions, clicks and page views delivered by social media

...return on social media marketing can be measured just as everything else marketers do online...

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Social Media Tracking and Dashboarding Examples

SocialEye: Social ROI RevealedBelow and on the following pages are examples of social media ROI tracking using SocialEye. SocialEye is a complete ROI tracking solution for marketers that allows you to report the results of your social media marketing by tracking:

o Leads and Revenueo Site Traffico Social Connectionso Media Valueo and more...

The following examples present dashboard views that cover Traditional Online Metrics that marketers tend to view as hard data as well as New Social Media Metrics that are becoming standard KPI’s for social media marketers.

SocialEye aggregates and visualizes data from a variety of online sources to give companies a clear view of their social media marketing ROI funnel, from the traffic level to the lead level and finally to the sales revenue level.

Enlargements on pg. 5 and pg. 6

...from the traffic level to the lead level and finally to the sales revenue level.

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


Executive Dashboard

Traditional Online Metrics

SocialEye takes hard ROI data from your site such as traffic, leads and revenue and tracks it back to its social media source.

SocialEye goes beyond the buzz to track leads, revenue and ROI.

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


Executive Dashboard

New Social Media Metrics

SocialEye’s dashboard visualizes your social outreach programs and your fan base. Engagement levels are tracked by retweets, comments and likes. The application allows you to drill down on any point, provides views of daily activities and provides insights for further investigation.

Social media marketing yields newer metrics including connections and engagements.

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


Individual Metric and Data Visualization ExamplesFollowing are explanations of some individual metrics from the two categories, Traditional Online Metrics and New Social Media Metrics. They are by no means all the things that can be tracked and do not go deep into the buzz and sentiment ratings typically used by branding, PR and reputation management. Rather they focus on the harder metrics that online and direct marketers would tend to focus on such as driving users to a conversion form similar to lead generation PPC campaigns.

...focus on the harder metrics that online and direct marketers would tend to focus on...

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


Traditional Online MetricsThese are marketing performance metrics online media has used for years, and that still very much apply to the social media world:

o Traffico Leadso Revenue

Traffic/VisitsSocialEye tracks daily traffic to your home web site and breaks it down by social media source including:

o Social networking (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.)o Micro-blogging (Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku, BubbleTweet, etc.)o Blogs and Wikis (Blogger, WordPress, Wikipedia, etc.)o Video sharing (YouTube, VIO, MySpace Video, etc.)o Photo sharing (Flickr, Photobucket, Zoomr, etc.)o Social bookmarking (Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.)o Forums, opinion and review (Yelp, Epinions, TripAdvisor, etc.)

SocialEye helps marketers report the quantity and sources of site traffic produced from their social media marketing efforts.

SocialEye tracks daily traffic to your home web site and breaks it down by social media source ...

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


LeadsJust as you can track site traffic growth attributable to your social media program, so too can you analyze how social media marketing impacts your lead generation programs. Based on referring or tracking URL, you can see how many of your social media visitors complete lead generation forms or initiate online chat sessions with your sales reps. By dynamically generating toll-free numbers on your site based on the referring URL of a site visitor, you can trace how many of your visitors from social media sites are calling in as well.

SocialEye reports on the quantity of leads that social media referred traffic produces on your site.

...see how many of your social media visitors complete lead generation forms...

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


RevenueIn the same manner as traffic and leads, e-commerce sales volume and revenue can be tracked and sourced to referring social media sites. Likewise, by using unique toll-free numbers in your social media promotional campaigns, and by dynamically generating phone numbers displayed on your site based on referring or tracking URL, you can keep tabs on how social media marketing is helping with your phone-based sales.

Data from your CRM system can be looped back into SocialEye to provide a visualization of your revenue trends, broken out by referral source including social media sites and search engines.

SocialEye helps you determine what social channels and strategies produce the most revenue.

E-commerce sales volume and revenue can be tracked and sourced to referring social media sites.

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


New Social Media Metrics

Connections: Friends, Fans, Followers and SubscribersOne way to look at the value of a Facebook fan, a Twitter follower, or a YouTube subscriber is to view it in the same way you view an opt-in subscriber to your email list. The messaging that you can convey to a follower, and especially to a fan or subscriber, can be just as compelling, engaging, and convertible to revenue as what you convey to your opt-in email subscribers. At the same time, communicating to friends, fans, and followers has some advantages over communicating to email subscribers:

o Unlike emails, social media messages do not get caught in spam filters.o Unlike emails, social media messages do not need to be opened to be

read. Once they’ve reached the friend, fan, or follower’s social media environment, they’re there to be seen.

o Unlike email addresses, people’s social media addresses rarely if ever change.

SocialEye helps you visualize and analyze the growth of your social connections (friends, fans, followers, subscribers). Its notation feature lets you build a marketing journal to identify the causes of spikes in your social connections. Furthermore, it shows a detailed demographic breakdown of your Facebook fans.

...visualize and analyze the growth of your social connections...

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


Social Channel TrafficNo doubt you’re closely tracking traffic to your web site, with an eye toward the lead and revenue potential in that traffic. Why not look at traffic to your social media properties in the same way? If your Facebook page or YouTube channel is engaging and has the potential to influence your target audience — to help retain current customers and win new ones — then why not regard page views in your social media landscape as comparable in value to page views on your main site, and just as worthy as a performance metric? If your social media page supports lead capture or links to a lead capture landing page, it could have the same conversion potential as a page on your main site. In fact, most web sites have many low value pages that generate page views that aren’t nearly as meaningful as page views on a well-produced social media page.

Your social media pages should be looked at as extension pages of your web site that simply live in other places. The ROI value of a web page is determined not by where it lives, but rather by how well it engages current and prospective customers.

SocialEye helps you visualize the visits and page views you generate in social channels and profiles like Facebook and YouTube. This is similar to looking at visits and page views on your website.

Social media pages should be looked at as extension pages of your web site...

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


Engagement: Likes and CommentsIf you’re currently tracking engagement rates for your rich media advertising like PointRoll and EyeWonder banners, it’s easy to see the value in tracking consumer engagement with your social media content. Clearly consumers liking and commenting on your posts and content are high value brand interactions. In addition, the comments can yield extremely valuable consumer opinions and sentiment data. Furthermore, knowing what content your customers and prospects react positively to helps you to optimize your content development efforts and lets you focus on creating social dialogues people truly care about.

SocialEye lets you identify comments and tweets that your audience cares about by measuring the volume of their comments, likes and retweets. Furthermore it lets you analyze their comments by capturing those comments and creating comment clouds.

...the value of consumer engagement with your social media content...

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


Media Equivalent ValuesMedia equivalent value is a metric that expresses a monetary value for all the impressions, engagements, clicks, page views, actions and other outcomes you receive through your social media marketing activities if you were to buy them through conventional online channels. For example, SocialEye can track all the clicks you get from tweeting and posting to Facebook and then assign a value to that traffic based on what you currently pay for the banner clicks you get from your paid online media programs. Media equivalent value can also be applied to the impressions, video views and engagements you are able to track via the SocialEye Dashboard.

SocialEye looks at the quantity of posts, comments, video plays and traffic to your website from

social channels and calculates the media equivalent value of that activity.

...what would you have had to spend to drive the impressions, engagements, clicks…

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SOCIAL ROI REVEALED


ConclusionSocial Media Growth

As businesses and organizations of all sizes increase the time and money they invest in social media marketing, so will grow the need to justify those investments and prove their worth. Tracking and dashboarding technologies such as SocialEye that go beyond tracking buzz and sentiment will become critical to marketers in closing the loop on Social Media ROI. Current web analytics packages will evolve to tell part of the story, but since the sources of data to fully quantify social media ROI are so varied, true social media ROI tracking will require flexible data consolidation, visualization and dashboarding tools such as SocialEye.

You Can Track Social Media

The truth of the matter is that accurate Social Media ROI tracking is possible right now and SocialEye is one solution for achieving closed loop Social Media Marketing ROI reporting. The perception that social media cannot be tracked is a simple product of off-the-shelf tracking and analytic tools not accommodating the varied data sources required to properly establish social ROI. There is no reason for organizations not to track social media ROI just like other online marketing and media tactics. What is required to make this happen is flexible thinking and tools to bring the required data together.

Social Media Marketing Optimization

Once organizations implement effective social media ROI tracking solutions they will also be able to increase the performance of their social media marketing platforms by understanding what activities and tactics produce high levels of consumer engagement and actions. Content, offers and messaging infused into an organization’s social stream (Twitter tweets, Facebook posts, videos, etc.) can all be adjusted and optimized to encourage higher levels of engagement and transactions. While this optimization process may be slower than optimizing an online media or paid search program, optimizing social media marketing is quite possible and actually critical. Furthermore, much of the insight gained from social media marketing optimization can be migrated to other marketing programs. This is because positive actions, feedback and comments in the social space can accurately reveal subjects, messaging and content that consumers actually like and care about.

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1 Quoted in Lisa van der Pool, Turning Tweets into Sales, http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/

stories/2010/03/15/story8.html#ixzz0kniWnQgr (March 16, 2010).

2 Jason Falls, What Is The ROI For Social Media, http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/2008/10/28/

what-is-the-roi-for-social-media (October 28, 2008).

3 Based on an online survey of more than 400 US companies and agencies, which took place in December 2009 and January 2010.

...accurately measure the ROI of social media, track leads and revenue through traditional monitoring metrics…

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