Tracking Social Media ROI with SocialEye

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

w w w. socialeye .com

Tracking and ROI with
Measuring and optimizing your return on social media marketing

SocialEye is a technology enabled service of:

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

Figuring out the ROI Social Media Performance and ROI
of social media “is the
million dollar question.” 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.

2
Overdrive Interactive | P 617-254-5000 | www.OverdriveInteractive.com

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

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

Social Media Metrics
To 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 views
o Actions: retail location searches, coupon downloads and other
valuable brand interactions
o Conversions: data capture, lead capture and phone calls
o 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
interactions
o 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
chatter
o 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

3

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

...from the traffic level to Social Media Tracking and Dashboarding Examples
the lead level and finally SocialEye: Social ROI Revealed
to the sales revenue level. Below 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 Revenue
o Site Traffic
o Social Connections
o Media Value
o 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

4

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

SocialEye goes beyond Executive Dashboard
the buzz to track leads, Traditional Online Metrics
revenue and ROI.

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

5

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

Social media marketing Executive Dashboard
yields newer metrics New Social Media Metrics
including connections
and engagements.

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.

6

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

...focus on the harder Individual Metric and Data Visualization Examples
metrics that online and Following are explanations of some individual metrics from the two
direct marketers would 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
tend to focus on... 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.

7

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

SocialEye tracks daily Traditional Online Metrics
traffic to your home web These are marketing performance metrics online media has used for years,
site and breaks it down and that still very much apply to the social media world:

by social media source ... o Traffic
o Leads
o Revenue

Traffic/Visits
SocialEye 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.

8

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

...see how many of your Leads
social media visitors Just as you can track site traffic growth attributable to your social media
program, so too can you analyze how social media marketing impacts your
complete lead generation lead generation programs. Based on referring or tracking URL, you can see
forms... 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.

9

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

E-commerce sales volume Revenue
and revenue can be tracked In the same manner as traffic and leads, e-commerce sales volume and
revenue can be tracked and sourced to referring social media sites. Likewise,
and sourced to referring by using unique toll-free numbers in your social media promotional
social media sites. 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.

10

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

...visualize and analyze New Social Media Metrics
the growth of your social Connections: Friends, Fans, Followers and Subscribers
connections... One 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.

11

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

Social media pages Social Channel Traffic
should be looked at as No 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
extension pages of your social media properties in the same way? If your Facebook page or YouTube
web site... 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.

12

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

...the value of consumer Engagement: Likes and Comments
engagement with your If 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
social media content... 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.

13

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

...what would you Media Equivalent Values
have had to spend to Media equivalent value is a metric that expresses a monetary value for all the
impressions, engagements, clicks, page views, actions and other outcomes
drive the impressions, you receive through your social media marketing activities if you were to buy
engagements, clicks… 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.

14

SOCIAL ROI REVEALED

...accurately measure Conclusion
the ROI of social media, Social Media Growth
track leads and revenue 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
through traditional investments and prove their worth. Tracking and dashboarding technologies
monitoring metrics… 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.

____________________________________________
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.

15

Tracking Social Media ROI with SocialEye

Recomendados

Recomendados

Más contenido relacionado

La actualidad más candente

La actualidad más candente (20)

Similar a Tracking Social Media ROI with SocialEye

Similar a Tracking Social Media ROI with SocialEye (20)

Más de Overdrive Interactive

Más de Overdrive Interactive (15)

Último

Último (20)

Tracking Social Media ROI with SocialEye