Measuring Social ROI using Adobe & Google

In the ‘good old days’ of marketing, measuring campaign success used to be a very simple task.

• Step 1: Go out and spend a bunch of money
• Step 2: Measure product sales before & after campaign went to market
  • Increase in sales = SUCCESS!
  • No increase / decrease in sales = Failure

Needless to say: Definitely not the most accurate way to measure success

With the advent of digital media channels — paid, owned & earned — measuring campaign success has become a real task, especially in the owned space.

Which begs the question...

How is your company measuring owned, or social, media performance?

Here are a few tools your brand can use to measure everything from vanity metrics to hard ROI performance in the social media space.

Adobe SocialAnalytics

Adobe's social product allows brands to track activity across social media platforms as well as note users who wind up on your website. If you sell something on your website, their platform can connect that social activity to a sale.

Take their Expedia campaign, for example. Expedia put up $1 million in prizes and simply required users to RSVP five other Facebook users to enter the contest. When Adobe crunched the numbers, they realized that the 750% increase in Facebook fans beat the existing cost-per-fan benchmark by 4.5 times!

Google Social reports

Google Social allows marketers to tap into their existing Google analytics dashboard to measure social ROI.

There are just a few differences in the Google product as compared to Adobe:

• Google is free
• Facebook and Twitter do not provide ‘like’ data and other social environment metrics
• The data completely revolves around your own website

Another capability Google provides is ‘assisted conversions’, which allows brands to see that a user interacted with the brand website days, weeks and even months ago, then returned at a later date to convert.

What's still missing when measuring social ROI?

Both Adobe and Google have made great first attempts with their social measurment platforms, but as a brand / agency there is still something missing from the equation:

Talented planners and analysts.

Having the shiniest new bike on the block is only as great as being able to reach the pedals — the same goes for planning and measuring your social activity online. If your company doesn’t have the talent internally / an agency in place to measure this activity, then tapping into an analytics tool isn’t going to help.

So who is the resident planning / analytics expert at your company?