Poor Measurement Makes For Bad Appraisal Of ROI

If you don’t track what your SM sites are doing you have no idea what is working and what is not. If you’re tracking the wrong stuff you can go way off course, especially with it comes to Social Media. It becomes very easy to fall into the trap of measuring activities and not results.

Activities are how many names you collect on twitter of any other SM site and not just the results those activities actually bring. If it does not net you a sale is it worth the time and effort? Don’t measure how many tweets you send out, or home many bogs you post. Measure how many buying decisions you make, or service problems you solve.

In a survey done by B2B and the Web Analytics Association, 48.3% of respondents are measuring social media and 24.3% plan to increase the budgets in this area. In another survey I read somewhere of about ~50 businesses about 45% said they had a positive ROI and 5% were going negative.

Larson Notes & Satire: There is nothing simple about measuring the people who visit your web or SM sites. Yet what do you need to know?

Unique visitors per month
Total page views
Demographics
Purchases off those hits.

If you add a channel or some kind of effort into your marketing mix you can then see if it has any effect on what you are doing in the way of a spike in web hits or actual sales. If you don’t track it, you have no idea what is happening. You are spending time and money blindly.

And then, you do not sell to every visitor to your site, do you? Don’t we wish. Rather you work off averages. If 10 people look at your site and 2 buy you have a 20% buying ratio. If you can carry that trend out long enough you should be able to bank on 20%. You know your efforts are going to pay back in hitting your target audience and that you get your of the 20%, or whatever that number is back in hard sales dollars. You might then want to know that average size of a sale. That way you will know in actual project dollars what kind of money you should be willing to invest. But that brings us to a different discussion that I might address next week.



Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
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