An interesting study from Tealium has revealed that businesses are grossly under-counting their social media and PR traffic. The reason for this is that they are not measuring their "view-through" traffic according to the firm.

The study shows that only 20% of visitors to sites from social media and PR are the result of a direct click. The remaining 80% are from "view-through," which measures traffic from Internet users who come to a site after viewing a piece of social media or online PR content that either didn’t contain a direct link to the site, or didn’t acquire the user as a result of a direct click from the content.

"This study shows why marketers who are serious about measuring the ROI of social media need to use view-through measurement in addition to existing click-though measurement," says Erik Bratt, CEO of Engage Social Media, a social media and PR agency focused on monitoring and measurement.

Tealium breaks social media and online PR traffic down into 3 scenarios:

- The social media outlet provides a direct link to a site and the visitor clicks the link – this is what is currently measured by existing analytics tools

- The social media outlet provides a direct link to a site, which is not clicked on, but the outlet still generates the interest for a future visit

- The social media outlet does not provide a direct link to the site and all traffic generated will be indirect and occurs as a view-through.

This brings to mind things like the DiggBar, Facebook’s similar bar, and things of this nature that provide users with third-party content while framed within the social network’s own format.

Tealium uses the study to push it’s own product that measures view-through, but if the data is accurate, this is certainly something that should be taken into consideration when measuring social media ROI. The Interactive Advertising Bureau actually released a document of social media advertising metric definitions that could help as well.