Think first when measuring social

Why marketers aren’t giving social media marketing the credit it deserves

Despite how important social media has become to marketers, Adobe are suggesting that it still isn’t being recognized for driving website traffic, engagement and conversions like it should be. The solution, Adobe suggest, might be as simple as making adjustments to how its contributions are captured and measured. In short, some attribution modelling might help you see social media marketing in a whole new light.

Remember that you don't need a paid service like Adobe Sitecatalyst to apply attribution thinking;  you can demonstrate the value of social media marketing through Google's new Social Reports (tutorial) which helps show assisted conversions influenced by social media.

Because social marketing is still so new, and let's not forget that, best practices for measuring the effectiveness of social efforts are still evolving. We've written before about ROI of social media, the IAB also developed a good framework some time ago.

An important new perspective?

So, what’s the best way to measure the impact of social media? And how can marketers more accurately attribute value to the role that social media provides to their marketing and advertising campaigns? To answer these questions, Adobe Digital Index interviewed social media analytics experts and analyzed 1.7 billion visits to the websites of more than 225 U.S. companies across the media, retail, and travel industries.

The Adobe research resulted in three major findings:

1. Last-click attribution, the most common measurement model used by marketers, undervalues social media’s role in engaging customers earlier in the buying process.
2. First-click attribution more accurately captures the impact of social media, increasing its value by up to 94 percent.
3. This increased value may be significant enough to change how marketers prioritise investments in social media sites and allocate spend across digital channels.

You can find the Adobe report here, here is the summary infographic.