Social Media Advertising

There is a tremendous movement towards advertising and presence on social media platforms. Facebook recently announced a billion monthly users who have generated more than a trillion likes. Read the BBC story here.

Accordingly, advertising patterns are changing. More than 20% of US online advertising is now on social media. This is unsurprising, as advertising follows people. If the eMarketer figures are to be believed, up to $8 billion will be spent on social media advertising this year.

The challenge is to translate advertising budgets and social media campaigns into conversions.

We’ve written an article on the subject of Social Media Advertising – Quantification – What Can Actually Be Counted?

Our conclusions revolve around the fact that, as a statistics company, we like counting things. Traditionally we count referred traffic and conversions from banners, searh engines, PPC campaigns, etc. Likes and followers are also interesting because they too can be counted, although the ROI is trickier to detect as a metric.

We use a metric called P/Pv (avg) which means pageview per visitor. This is in a lot of our reports, we use it to discern the difference in traffic quality between different sources.

A lot of the metrics we read about on social media tracking and monitors talk about brand engagement, conversation, sentiment, trends, consciousness, presence, reach, and participation. We’ve come to see these variables as a bridge from campaigns (read webpages) on social media platforms, that send traffic to your site, app, event, shop, signup, blog, etc.

Our take home message is that social media is obviously imortant, and its equally important to approach it with goals in mind. If you are building a campaign, try to build in some variables that you can measure.