Social Media Measurement Finally Comes Of Age
March 20, 2012 
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There’s a huge elephant in the room for marketing and PR pros: many stop short at measuring KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of their social marketing efforts, such as number of followers / fans or engagement with their communities.
This is a fine *start* to measuring the success of your social media marketing programs.
The problem with it is indicators are just that: an indication of success. Alone they’re not real results (outcomes!). And yet this is all most people report. Agencies, VPs and CMOs should demand more and that their teams define and track conversion metrics and economic value in addition to KPIs. And yes, everyone can get to conversion: if you say you can’t you’re not trying hard enough.
Today our team that works on Google Analytics is helping get you closer to social measurement zen by releasing a new set of reports designed to track conversions / revenue generated from social plus a holistic set of KPIs that matter.
The best part, in my opinion, is the fact that we’re going to help show not just last click attribution, but also how social attributed to a purchase that occurred at a later date. As social may be influencing buyers who return later via an ad, email campaign, search or other method.
This will help agencies better show the value of their programs and elevate their worth as well as brands make a case to increase social spends. Or, decrease spends if they don’t find social as effective as other channels – not every tactic makes sense for every business. As always, the answer is: it depends. And data will help you decide.
We’ve been arguing at the Future Buzz that your owned presence (like your website or blog) should be where you focus activities for years. External social communities aren’t where conversions happen anyway. It should be pretty obvious, but we have to say it (again) because some people are still confused or looking in all the wrong places. And our new reports help you bridge social with web to provide your platform agnostic model with far more insight.
With that said, head over to the Google Analytics blog and read our post for full details.
Disclosure: Adam works for the Google Analytics team as product marketing manager, however the opinions in the post are his own.
Nick Stamoulis replied | Mar 20, 2012 (30 comments)
Social media is important, but businesses need to realize that they don’t have complete control over their social presence. The social networks can make changes whenever they want, as evidenced by the change over to Timeline that is coming soon. A business website or blog should still be the hub of all internet marketing activity.
Danny Brown replied | Mar 20, 2012 (19 comments)
Amen, Nick – have your homebase abd build from there.
Social Media Man replied | Mar 20, 2012 (1 comment)
Social should all be about intimate engagement. The focus should be on small groups of influence. How many people started a conversation in their social graph around something related to your brand?
Look at the least likely group of people to use social media – bikers at Bike Week in Daytona, Yet Harley Davidson got stellar results from a social media experience that captured their fans at the height of real-world engagement. 1,500 VIPs drove 128,000 online comments, Likes and shares. That’s stellar ROI. Inforgraphic here: http://tinyurl.com/72gqndj
Jeremy Vandermeij replied | Mar 21, 2012 (6 comments)
This is really exciting. Intuition has pointed me towards using social media as a tool for all my smaller business clients, because its affordable and creates a buzz. However, its harder to convince conversion/results driven thinkers of its benefits. So this will certainly help.
Fernanda Langa replied | Mar 22, 2012 (1 comment)
Something to consider is how powerless a company is about what is being said about them through social media outlets- yes they can track what’s being said but they can’t change it. For this reason a company should not depend on social media for everything they do. I agree with you Nick.
Fernanda Langa
Betty Sue Haynes replied | Mar 26, 2012 (1 comment)
I so agree. You can really find yourself in hot water at times with social media. Sometimes if someone gives a bad review, people come out of the woodwork and it has a domino effect.
Bruce McFarland replied | Apr 4, 2012 (1 comment)
These new GA features are a great enhancement, particularly the Advanced Segments capability to track and compare traffic from multiple social media sites. As to whether websites or social sites are better locales for conversions, it really depends on the audience, the product/service and the nature of the sales process.
A simple product with a straightforward value proposition and well-targeted audience can certainly produce conversions on a social site. More complex products, services and value props may require in-depth explanation via website — or more social input from the vendor, experts, customers, or similarly-situated prospects.
Social media is increasingly becoming the place where the purchase decision (most important ‘conversion’) is made, although the sales transaction make take place in a website, telephone mail order or bricks-and-mortar store. By properly instrumenting and analyzing these channels, businesses can assess the absolute and relative values of these lead sources.