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Tracking Social Media ROI Viewing Spectrum Analytics
Marshall Sponder – Webmetricsguru.com
now.seo@gmail.com@webmetricsguru09/05/2010
 
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 An Introduction to Spectrum Analytics for Social Media ROI
Social Media is a airly new communications medium andactivity that is oten considered to be “ree” and availableto everyone. With abundant ree and low cost tools andplatorms to create, promote, monitor and analyze socialmedia content businesses and individuals, excited aboutwhat Social Media can do or them, too oten assume thatmeasurement o Social Media can be taken care o asmore o an aterthought.In the past estimating Social Media ROI was acceptable,increasingly that is no longer the case as outlined byTheBrandBuilder, Oliver Blanchard
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. As CMOs and CEOshave started to seriously consider Social Media as aneective marketing medium, they also seeking a similarlevel o precision in Return on Investment (ROI) metricsthey have gotten rom Direct Marketing. Everyone isattempting to devise a ramework or their company’sSocial Media ROI, but the challenge is somewhat dierentor each business and industry.What are the metrics; beyond the basics such as howmany Fans and Followers an account has that can actuallyhelp management manage better? And, o course, whatmetrics aect the HOLY GRAIL o business metrics: thebottom line?Lately, a lot o attention has been placed o ormulasto calculate Social Media ROI. In act, earlier this year Altimeter Group and Web Analytics Demystied shared aramework or Social Media Metrics and ROI
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addressingthe Marketing Industry Challenge:”I can’t measure socialmedia ROI.” The metrics were generalized to t intoa ramework, which I analyzed
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in a series o posts atWebmetricsguru.com. I believe the ramework is a step inthe right direction, but much more guidance is needed.I will even go urther by suggesting we avoid talking abouttwo dimensional ormulas in order to calculate SocialMedia ROI, even though it is tempting to do so, beorewe are able to capture the inormation to put into thoseormulas. While we can reduce a business’s nancials to aseries o ormulas that calculate protability or loss, whichis airly well instrumented by accounting sotware andCPA’s and best practices have been or hundreds o years(or the sake o investment and protability), it’s much moredicult to do the same thing or Social Media ROI (whichis only a ew years old).
Why I wrote this paper, ndingUltraviolet Data Nuggets andRainbow Analytics
Over the past year I worked with Cecilia Pineda Feret
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 analyzing the web site and social media o the HavanaCentral
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restaurant group with a ew locations inManhattan. We attempted to provide ROI inormationto the owner o the group and we regularly discussedthe challenge o tracking our eorts or the company,the brand and the bottom line. For a small business,tracking and measuring this involves looking under theradar and ollowing over the rainbow to nd the ROI.Yet, every business has a dierent pot o golden datanuggets
(or rainbow pancakes, they’re easier to fnd!), or RAINBOW ROI (Cecilia Pineda Feret coined this term inour discussions about Havana Central ROI tracking and analytics).
The usual data on the radar are easy to capture:hits, ollowers, page views, etc. These metrics aremore diagnostic according to Stratigent’s JennierVeesenmeyer
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, allowing you to compare data pointsover time, and against competitors, and so on withoutnecessarily providing any actionable insight into what thebusiness should change or keep doing. Additional metricsare also required such as knowing results o eorts whichwere the most eective in bringing in sales, expanding the
 
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customer base, and increasing exposure o the brand. Acting as an analyst here my insights are usuallyconnected with data I touch. I reasoned data to proveSocial Media outreach is eective in driving new businessand revenue was available, but we were not able tocapture it. I termed such data as “ultraviolet”, because wecan’t see ultraviolet light, yet it’s present all around us.I thought about what it takes to capture the inormationand tabulate it. When I started this line o thought my goalwas not necessarily to solve Havana Central’s problemas much as to prove community management was aneective income generator or any restaurant chain. Idecided to create an approach anyone could use to ndhow much data they were missing and what they could doto enable data capture in preparation or Social Media ROIbased on the need to analyze the ull spectrum o data andinitial discussion o the concept can be ound on my blog
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. While coming up with this approach we realized HavanaCentral really needed a connection rom the business andhow it operates to the customer, and back to the businessor tracking via analytics using tactics such as couponing,secret passwords and perks or VIPs, etc.Read on to nd out more about the methodology.
Setting Measurement Goals
Every business alls into some type o category. In orderto know what is realistic to strive or in relation to SocialMedia, it helps to know what the average trac is andsites or the category you business is in.For restaurants, on average 5% o reerral trac to toprestaurants comes rom Facebook, 0.16% rom Twitter and.27% comes rom MySpace.com according to Compete’sReerral Analytics Trac Dashboard or the EntertainmentGuide: Restaurant and Dining Category. (a new oering oCompete I provided suggestions about early on).
Figure 1
– Compete PRO Reerral Analytics TracDashboard, July 2010 or Industry Category: EntertainmentGuide: Restaurants and Dining
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Havana Central’s Reerral trac as detailed by Compete.com shows no trac at all rom Social Networks (lowsample site) and so a marketing goal ought to includemeeting or surpassing the average reerral trac romSocial Networks or the relevant category – in this case,several hundred more visits per month rom Facebookalone would be called or (note: Google Analytics showssome Facebook and Twitter trac to havanacentral.com).Similar diagnostics can be obtained rom Google AnalyticsBenchmarking (when sharing data with Google) based onbusiness type. The charts below show that on average,Havana Central gets 3.75 times more visits than theaverage restaurant using Google Analytics but the averagerestaurant is generating more pageviews per visit (it mayhave more to do, in this case, with PDF menus that aredownloaded but not counted as pageviews or otherwisetracked by Google Analytics unless virtual pageviews arecreated or each menu).
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