4 Unique Approaches for Measuring Social Media ROI
Calculating ROI in social media is a hot topic. As companies have rushed into the elusive social media marketing gold mine, many are left trying to figure out if all the time and effort is paying off.
The problem is that social media is extremely difficult to measure. In a former life, I worked as a financial analyst at P&G, and a big part of my job was to measure the ROI of our different marketing efforts. In calculating the return on traditional media, we often found that we couldn’t exactly calculate everything, so we resorted to some creative approaches.
There are many challenges to measuring the return from social media, most notably:
•Volume of social media activity isn’t always related to social media efforts. A provocative television spot or a new product launch can generate social media mentions that aren’t related to your specific social media efforts.
•The value of social media is more than just marketing and can involve product research, customer service, public relations, and consumer research. All of these benefits can’t easily be tied back to a sales number.
•Even what we can count isn’t always accurate. When measuring online, we often look at the last click that led someone to our website, and brands will look at traffic and possibly sales generated from social media sites. The problem is that we know in marketing that it takes up to seven touch points to build a brand impression, and only attributing the last click minimizes the role that other marketing tools played.
•Traditional metrics of reach don’t work well because the quality of impressions on social media sites can be very different. We measure traditional media based on reach or how many people are exposed to the message, but in social media, the message can range from positive to negative and from passive to highly involved, making it difficult to determine the value of each impression.
These are only a few of the challenges that you may face as a part of your social media marketing measurement. Creative Ways to Measure (or at Least Validate) Your Social Media Efforts Measuring ROI isn’t always an exact science (unless you have a large measurement budget based on complex modeling), but there are some approaches to measurement that can at least validate your efforts.
Read more: ClickZ
Microsoft Adding Social To Brand Display Ads For Guaranteed And Non-Guaranteed Inventory Says GM Creegan
As part of Social Media Week festivities in NYC, Microsoft Advertising announced what it’s calling “People Powered Stories.” Formally launching next month, the offering will begin by incorporating social commerce tech from Bazaarvoice and is the first step in Microsoft’s social display strategy.
Microsoft Advertising GM of Display Advertising Experiences, Jennifer Creegan said on the Microsoft Ad blog, “We believe it will give marketers the ability to create ads that tell powerful stories and create brand relevancy beyond just a ‘Like’ by adding the authenticity and believability of real people’s real stories.” Read more – and see examples.
Creegan and Brant Barton, GM, Media Solutions for Bazaarvoice, discussed the announcement and its implications with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Can you talk about the significance of today’s announcement for Microsoft?
Jennifer Creegan: I would bucket it down into a couple of simple points. We are passionate about how we’re bringing social advertising to the entire marketing campaign. As we did research across both the consumer landscape and the marketer landscape, it became clear that there was a crossover need around word‑of‑mouth marketing, and specifically, ratings and reviews.
For us, the significance of this announcement is that we’re taking what we have been good at for a long time, which is interesting brand canvases across the digital ecosystem, and marrying that with our ratings and reviews content so that the marketer can have their story, and their consumer stories, tell a still more complete story, if you will, to potential customers. Bazaarvoice is our first partner in the People Powered Stories social framework.
Read more: AdExchanger
Vibrant Acquires Image Space Media
Vibrant Media, the global leader in premium contextual advertising, announces today the acquisition of Image Space Media (ISM), the in-image advertising technology company.
The deal is part of Vibrant Media’s mission under new CEO, Cella Irvine, to expand upon its existing suite of contextual solutions with innovative placements that deliver high performance for top brands, new revenue opportunities for quality publishers, and relevant experiences for consumers. With several key innovations in 2011, Vibrant Media’s contextual platform (VXPlatform) now includes a suite of advertising products – Vibrant Image, Vibrant Video, Vibrant Bar, and Vibrant Display – in addition to Vibrant In-Text.
“Traditional ad models were brought online through pre-roll and display, but we create unique media placements that are designed for the interactive nature of the internet and deliver truly relevant ad experiences to users,” says Cella Irvine, CEO of Vibrant Media. “Roughly 30% of our publishers’ content is images and they now play an important role in our strategy to deliver new media placements.”
“ISM shares Vibrant’s vision to create industry-leading in-image contextual advertising,” says Kevin Tung, Co-founder and COO of Image Space Media. “By combining our image technology with Vibrant’s unmatched scale, robust contextual platform, and incredible sales force, we’ve built a significant offering. Vibrant is a company unafraid to invent – we love everything about that.”
The Role Of Real-Time Bidding For Marketers
“Ad Agents” is a column written by the agency-side of the digital media community.
Joseph Leon, Managing Director EMEA of Essence Digital, a global, digital marketing agency based in London and New York.
In 2011, the biggest hype, the loudest buzz and the best conversation starter in digital media was without doubt RTB – (Real Time Bidding). Big words, such as revolutionary, seismic and rocket science, were bandied around and based on remarkably similar sales pitches from several leading RTB players, you’d be hard pressed not to believe that half of NASA’s scientists had jumped ship to join the digital revolution.
At its most basic, RTB is a mechanism for trading ad space in real time – sellers can essentially hold an auction for each impression and advertisers can assess, price and bid for it dynamically.
The main benefits for advertisers are indisputably cost efficiency and targeting – you pay the right price for what you need and discard what you don’t. But in practice, what does this mean for advertisers?
Adobe Completes Acquisition of Efficient Frontier
Today, Adobe solutions are central to how digital marketing and advertising are created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. Our focus on market leadership in the digital marketing space has driven some dramatic changes at Adobe including the recent acquisition of Efficient Frontier, a leader in multi-channel and auction-based digital advertising optimization across search, display and social media.
With Efficient Frontier, Adobe delivers an industry-leading independent platform for digital ad buying to our customers. With this addition to our Digital Marketing Suite, we offer a more powerful solution for managing search, display and social media to better answer the needs of our customers. Even more importantly, we add the expertise of over 300 talented Efficient Frontier employees to our team.
Collective UK Launches Private Exchange for Premium Video Advertising
Collective has today announced the launch of a private marketplace to offer media buying agencies and advertisers real-time bidding (RTB) access to its premium video platform.
Combining Adap.tv’s RTB technology with Collective’s audience data, Collective’s private exchange will offer pre-roll video advertising space across targeted audiences and premium publishers in real-time auctions. Publishers include IPC, WWE, The Independent, Sony Music and iVillage.
The move will see Collective become the first in the UK to launch an RTB private ad marketplace for premium video programming.
“Our marketplace gives advertisers and agency partners a new way to access premium VoD inventory, but with this inventory being in such demand, we don’t see it as a low cost entry to buy video in the UK,” said Jamie Estrin, Director of Collective Video. “RTB pricing is controlled by supply and demand, and high quality premium video is always in high demand in the UK.”
