John Squire, Chief Strategy Officer of Coremetrics, spoke at last weeks Social Media Strategies conference and gave some insights into measuring ROI in Social Media. He presented some information from a case study on Seton Hall University that I found very interesting and wanted to share with you. A quick overview of a recent social media study showed that 30% of marketers invest significant time and money to develop applications and special tabs on Facebook. This was certainly to be expected.
But the study also found that 58 percent of marketers hold their Facebook investments accountable for driving key business metrics, such as website sales, conversions and visits. This was new news because 81% of marketers understand that Facebook does not generate direct website traffic. Facebook is generally seen as a tool to nurture prospects that will eventually come to a website via alternative channels.
So how can you do both at the same time?
Squire showed how to benchmark social sites against other channels like paid search, natural search, display, direct load, and referring sites. The example that he used showed that the social media sites generated a high percentage of new visitors that were highly engaged (measured by session loyalty).
Seton Hall
Seton Hall University had created a Flickr account in 2007, a YouTube channel in 2008, a Twitter account in 2008, and a Facebook page in 2009. But a big question remained, were these social media platforms converting prospective students into applicants?
Seton Hall used a new metric called “conversion efficiency” which measured “event completing sessions” against “sessions”. They were able to determine that their Facebook visitors were more likely to convert than their visitors from natural search, referring sites, marketing programs, or direct load. It was also determined that most of their visitors came from two main geographical regions (they used a Facebook traffic heatmap).
Now they were able to plan their offline events in a more cost-effective manner. Mr. Squire’s declared outcome was that you can “attribute appropriate credit to social media for influencing subsequent website behavior” by joining “social media data with web analytics data accurately.” To do this, you need to “look beyond Facebook page visits and fan counts” and “measure social performance using KPIs.”
So we can measure ROI in social media even if there aren’t any clicks to count? Apparently so.
For more information please feel free to read the Coremetrics press release Coremetrics Announces ROI Measurement Capabilities for Facebook.
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Yet another solid post full of great info, Jeff – thanks for this.
Just goes to show the doubters of ROI that measurement comes in many forms – businesses should read this post and use it as a guideline for their own social media involvement.
Cheers!
.-= Danny Brown´s last blog ..Where You Fit In =-.
Thanks Danny and I would say that we all need to be looking at news ways of measuring success online. I love when someone shows that there are other effective ways of gauging success than utilizing the same old formulas.
Thanks again,
Jeff