What’s your biggest frustration with measuring social media? Let us know.

“If you set business objectives properly and the way that a lot of marketers have become accustomed to over the years, [then] it’s not that difficult to tie social media activity back to the business objective,” said Fleet.

“That’s the piece that’s really missing from a lot of the campaigns nowadays,” he added.

The biggest problem with measurement is that marketers jump right in and utilize social media sites without having a plan in place. As Fleet explains, marketers need to develop business objectives and then find tactics that are measurable against the objectives.

He went on to say that these metrics depend on who users are reporting to. For instance, most executives don’t care how many retweets they have. Instead, they care about their bottom line and how their social media strategy relates back to their real business goals of increasing sales, expanding their business, etc.

Here’s an interesting pyramid from Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group that shows specific examples of which metrics the various business roles need:

Fleet also raised a good point in regards to a report that the Harvard Business Review published. The report suggests that the new metric of “Return on Influence” was replacing the conventional “Return on Investment” (ROI) metric. The way to find this “Return on Influence” metric, according to the post is to:

“Divide the total revenue generated via social efforts by the number of social media fans and followers, and you get a per-fan/follower value.”

Fleet believes this is misleading for a number of reasons. For starters, the term “influence” is used widely across the social media industry, but there is not a clear definition of it. Fleet told us that “Return on Investment” was a business metric but that “Return on Influence” was not even a concrete number.

“I really think it’s a mistake to try to fit a square peg into a round hole with this and try and come up with a brand new metric,” he said.

“What we should be doing is trying to tie back social media activities… to business objectives. Anything other than that is just skirting the issue.”

Another mistake that marketers make with social media measurement is thinking that what works for one company will also work on another. Fleet told us that this is not true at all. To find out what specific metrics a business should examine, he said that the marketers needed to look at their individual business and their goals.

“You can’t just plug a name or a field into a computer and come up with a one-size-fits-all solution,” pointed out Fleet. “It really has to be tailored to the organization.”

Fleet said that he was “very alarmed” since so much misinformation is being distributed online about social media measurement. He told us that Katie Paine and others were advocating a mission to educate both agencies and clients on measurement.

Does all the conflicting information that is circulating online confuse you?

Your friendly neighborhood WebProNews writers have always said the best meal in the world is a free one. We’re not surprised to see that sentiment extend to other industries, particularly on their websites.

Website monitoring service Pingdom took a look at the top 500 websites to see if Google Analytics made inroads into them with its Analytics product. They noted their findings at the Royal Pingdom blog, and we’ll admit to some surprise about them:

We put the Alexa global top 500 websites under the microscope and found that 161 out of these 500 websites are using Google Analytics, which is 32.2%.

Even though website statistics is only a secondary market to Google, the free availability of Google Analytics must have had a profound effect on the bottom line for competing, commercial products from companies who cannot afford to offer their services for free.

We think the access Google must have to the data for that many heavily-linked and trafficked sites pays for the free service many times over. Google owns basically a third of the market for web analytics, and charges customers nothing for it. That’s an amazing statistic.

Earlier this morning, we noted Google’s interest in mobile advertising. The mobile platform may be heating up for analytics as well, as measurement firm comScore disclosed its acquisition of M:Metrics in a cash and stock deal today.

Opening the doors at Facebook to anyone who wished to register proved a successful strategy at boosting the social network’s audience. In the comScore top 20 of gaining properties ranked by percentage, Facebook rose by 81 percent to 34.6 million uniques in December 2007, compared to December 2006.

Impressive, but good enough percentage-wise only for seventh place. Other sites gained through a variety of means in comScore’s determination of year-over-year increases for December.

List topper Everyday Health bought its way to the top by acquiring sites like Drugs.com. That boosted uniques to 12 million, a 349 percent gain. Women’s category leader Glam Media opened new websites, picking up 25 million uniques for a 213 percent rise.

Clever promotions had their place in helping sites pull in more December visitors. OfficeMax had a hit on its hands when its ElfYourself.com greeting site gained a viral following. Their 15.3 million uniques virtually tripled from the previous December.

Craigslist continued to build on the shift from newspaper to online classifieds. Only Wikipedia, Facebook, Glam Media, and a pair of broadband providers outdrew Craigslist’s 24.4 million uniques in December.

You know, I try not to, it’s a buzz kill. I’m kidding…

This question surfaces all the time. It’s hands down one of the biggest challenges we marketers face, but come on, it’s not impossible. Yeah, we need better weights and measuring sticks for new media — they will come — but don’t let that stop you from adapting and customizing an approach that works for your business.

There are three things you should think about when it comes to measurement, each I’d argue are equally important:

Outputs

Pretty self explanatory, right. Is content being created? It could be a blog post or a forum topic or a video, you get the gist. Try not to get too hung up on the "how much" part of the output. Focus instead on the quality and relevancy of what’s being produced and the utility of the medium for you and your customers.

Outgrowths

Again, pretty simple. What stems or grows from the content that was created? It could be comments, links, tags, diggs, votes, etc. How people choose to participate with the content will vary so try to think about the value and weight you place on certain actions — and how you might better enable them.

Outcomes

Basically, the net result or response to the first two things. It could be attention (influencers, media), amplification (memes), engagement (quality/quantity of comments), sentiment (positive/negative), this is where you have to simply interpret and weigh the shake out. And then compare your analysis to whatever the hell your goals were to begin with. Oh, and then pray they line up.

Keep in mind, all of this is just one approach to measurement — an admittedly simple one for an increasingly complex web. I tend to think social media measurement will always be half science/half art, and maybe for that reason, always be a headache too, but hopefully this gives folks one guy’s framework to pivot and build on.

Related Post:

Social Media Measurement Deconstructed

[Cross published on Voce Nation]

Comments

The partnership aims to create a picture of how audiences interact between media platforms and how exposure to a specific platform drives users to another platform. The partnership will use Nielsen’s TV/ Internet convergence panel to measure TV and Internet use in the same home along with data from Nielsen Mobile.

By measuring data from all three of ESPN’s platforms the company will be able to compare the reach of its television, Internet and mobile platforms. The partnership will enable ESPN to measure overlap and determine how many people use all three platforms.

The Nielsen panel will also examine how TV promotions bring people online and how online promotions direct people to watch ESPN programming. The panel will measure the amount of hours of TV and Internet usage per week along with time of day for specific demographics.

A number of ESPN advertisers will participate in the program to gain better insight about their advertising on ESPN platforms.

"This ESPN Nielsen initiative will forge new ground in cross-media measurement solutions, allow us to further understand user behavior and provide valuable insight for our advertisers," said Artie Bulgrin, senior vice president, research and sales development.

Consumer Engagement is also not simply captured on your website, it’s calculated using all touch points in a consumer’s (website, search engine, blog, banner ad, offline media, etc…). Consumer engagement has to be defined by marketing teams and appropriate stake holders so that it can be correlated to repetitive interactions by the consumer.

"Customer engagement is about putting the customer at the centre of everything we do and meeting their needs effectively. It’s about talking to customers about the things that are important to them in the language they use, at the right time and through the channel that is most convenient to them." cScape Annual Survey

Because consumer engagement is so difficult to measure I have compiled a list of trusted resources to help shorten (or potentially lengthen) the search for the right answers:

• iMedia Connection: iMedia Connection: Who Cares About Engagement?
• iMedia Connection: Consumer Engagement: What Does It Mean?
• Clickz: Consumer Engagement: Breaking the Perfect Measurement Myth
• Clickz: Get Ready to Enage with the Engagement Metric
• Read Between the Ps: Consumer Engagement – From Intrusive to Co-creation
• Web Metrics Guru: Consumer Engagement: What Does It Mean?
• Online Spin (Media Post): Are Engagement Believers In Denial?
• Econsultancy: Customer Engagement Survey Results
• WikiPedia: Customer Engagement
• Web Analytics Demystified: How do you calculate engagement? Part 1
• Web Analytics Demystified: How do you calculate engagement? Part II
• Wired Set: Terms of Engagement – Measuring the Active Consumer
• Adobe: Engagement
• Marketing ROI: Consumer Engagement is Measurable
• Dan Greenfield: Consumer Engagement – The New PR Metric
• Occam’s Razor: Engagement, It’s not a metrics, It’s an excuse
• Jim Novo: Measuring Consumer Engagement
• Anil Batra: Engagement, is it a metric or an excuse?
• Post Gazette: Strategies to involve the customer are the hot marketing trend

Comments

I’m going to weave in some posts on learnings and discussion resulting from X Change while I finish my SEM Analytics series, and I thought I’d start with one that came out of my SEM Analytics Huddle and so fits right in!

We spent a good chunk of time in the SEM Analytics Huddle talking through some basic issues in getting setup for measurement and structuring PPC campaigns to manage and monitor them effectively.

One thing that struck me in the discussion was that most of the Agency experts agreed that when they took over a program they usually found themselves rebuilding it from scratch. There’s an element of ethnocentrism here, but I think it’s more than that. PPC programs tend to start fairly clean and become increasingly messy as they are managed over time. So unless a PPC firm is really on top of things, a program that’s been running for awhile is often a mess.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that one pretty good way to see if your Agency is managing your campaign well is to review your Ad Groups and look to see if they make sense. If search terms that are fundamentally different in business concept are grouped together, then your buyer isn’t doing a very good job.

But as we talked through this issue at X Change, I was struck by the fact that the process as described was almost 100% subjective. Buyers basically seem to rely on their personal understanding of the business and the search terms to make these judgments. That’s fine as far it goes, but there are some simple analytic techniques that can help test these judgments – and I get the feeling they are rarely used.

Here’s a simple real-world example. Should “stock quote” and “real time stock quote” be grouped together? If you know the trading industry, you’d probably say no. The addition of real time to the phrase is a significant addition – one that constitutes a demand for particular type of service and that is fundamentally different from the search for a quote on a specific stock. But while subjectively I’d make this distinction, I might not be right. And there are other cases where I’d have no particularly strong judgment. Take “stock ticker,” for example. Should “stock ticker” be treated the same as “stock quote” or “real time stock quote” or is it a different beast entirely? How about “free stock quote” being grouped with “stock quote?”

These simple examples are repeated hundreds of times in most programs and each represents a potentially significant empirical question – one that can’t necessarily be resolved by any amount of learned discussion.

In many cases, the correct answer may depend not on abstract considerations of how the words are used in the language but on the real-world products, services and web pages a particular business deploys. “Stock Ticker” might best map to “stock quote” for one company but “real-time stock quote” in another. The PPC buyer doesn’t work in a world where every distinct concept is distinct to the business. What’s more, the buyer frequently has to group words together to achieve any measurable statistical significance in the tail and to provide any level of management. So there is always a cost to splitting words out – and that cost needs to be constantly weighed against the potential benefits.

These practical considerations mean that you can’t realistically just expect to treat every word as a distinct entity. But if you have to group search terms, how do you know your groups are any good?

There is actually a simple way to test your groups. Keep in mind, that what you are striving for in a group of words is homogeneity. The more similar the words, the better the grouping, and the more disparate the words, the more likely the grouping is to show significant differences in internal performance.

So to check the quality of your groupings, you can review the search term performance within the group to look for significant variations. There are two places to do this. First, you can check within your bid management system for variations in click through. These variations are often indicative, but they can also be misleading because the results are shaped by a surrounding marketplace that isn’t necessarily constant.

On the web analytics side, however, you can get a purer read. If visits sourced from particular search terms within a group behave significantly differently, then the group isn’t homogenous. You can track at several levels here – but I don’t generally recommend focusing on distant measures like conversion. Instead, I expect problems in homogeneity to show up almost immediately on the web site.

So what I’d recommend looking at are two simple measures by keyword within a group. The first is % single access pages (SAP). If a search term within a group has significantly different SAP performance, then it probably doesn’t belong in the group.

Secondly, I’d look at 1st click to see which link path is chosen. If the visitors for a specific term tend to jump in a different direction than those from the rest of the group, then the search term probably doesn’t belong.

By measuring the variation in these two measures within an Ad Group, you can quickly test your hypotheses about Search Term homogeneity within an Ad Group. Having this empirical data is especially important for Agency buyers who are taking over new accounts and may not have learned all the subtleties of the business yet.

In our experience, these two simple measures will catch the vast majority of Ad Group mismatches.

If you’ve setup your measurement to include Ad Groups, you can generally automate a significant amount of this in reporting. It should be possible to capture the core statistics (Single Access Pages and Top Next Pages/Links) for both Group and individual terms. With a snapshot like this, you should be able to check your assumptions quickly and adjust your Ad Groups appropriately.

Since truly homogenous Ad Groups are absolutely essential to effective PPC Management and optimization, this is much bigger deal than most people realize.

There are some arguments that web analytics just won’t help solve. There are others where appropriate web measurement can effectively end the discussion. You probably wouldn’t have thought that deciding on the subjective placement of search terms in Ad Groups was one of the latter – but it’s just one of the many surprising ways that web measurement can support better Search Engine Marketing.

Comments

We talked to Seidman about his site, and the panel of tech savvy people he featured discussing online video.

People like Ted Leonsis and Mark Cuban cited some of the challenges associated with coming to grips with Internet videos and their viewership:

Ted Leonsis: Measurement of any new medium is difficult, but it is especially so in a hyper-growth market like internet video. Internet video has a variety of challenges when it comes to measurement, the biggest of which is measuring the relative value of one video over another.

Mark Cuban: Defining unique users and getting streamers to release information to 3rd parties. It

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/net-video-measurements-gaining-interest-2007-09/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/quantcast-broadens-media-measurement-2007-09 http://www.webpronews.com/quantcast-broadens-media-measurement-2007-09#comments Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:00:53 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40642 Websites in Quantcast’s ‘Quantified Publisher’ program now have some new free media measurement tools to help determine the effectiveness of the videos and widgets they publish.

Knowledge is the lever that can move the world. In this century, there just isn’t much doubt about the importance of information.

There are places where who you know still surpasses what you know; Hollywood and politics come to mind. For everyone in e-business, knowing just a little bit more than the other webmaster could be the difference between going to Disney World on vacation, or just to the Disney Store for a couple of t-shirts.

Quantcast made another move to gain the custom of more websites for its Quantified Publisher program. The company rolled out more free media measurement services, announcing their debut today.

Quantcast CEO claimed over 15,000 site publishers have joined the program. These newest features, like video/widget impression and interaction tracking, give those sites a deeper look into how people use the content they distribute.

On the e-commerce side, Quantcast opened up secure measurement tags. These are suited for transactional pages on retailer sites. Quantcast claims these tags will not interfere with the checkout or overall shopping experience.

The company also broadened its Quantified Publisher Profiles, and now provides a Network View for measuring unduplicated reach along with aggregated traffic statistics for multiple sites and services.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/quantcast-broadens-media-measurement-2007-09/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/comscore-to-enhance-measurement-of-blog-audiences-2007-09 http://www.webpronews.com/comscore-to-enhance-measurement-of-blog-audiences-2007-09#comments Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:44:31 +0000 Mike Sachoff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40355 Digital measuring firm comScore, has introduced the comScore Conversational Media Report, a new service that offers global measurement of the audiences for blogging sites, which includes mainstream and niche blogs and social networking sites.

]]> Digital measuring firm comScore, has introduced the comScore Conversational Media Report, a new service that offers global measurement of the audiences for blogging sites, which includes mainstream and niche blogs and social networking sites.

After collaborating with Federated Media Publishing, which works with 140 conversational Web sites and marketers, comScore has put into place a custom weighting and projection system so the reporting of this category reflects the characteristics of the visitors to blogging sites covering a wide range of topics and interests.

The comScore Conversational Media Report will be available as a custom report within comScore’s MyMetrix interface. comScore’s new data projections will deal with the worldwide Internet audience and will not affect any site categories besides Conversational Media.

"With the creation and consumption of user generated Web 2.0 content continuing to grow at a rapid pace, our customers are requesting expanded reporting of consumer usage," commented Dr. Magid Abraham, CEO and co-founder of comScore.

"The comScore Conversational Media Report gives the most comprehensive and accurate view of this market by properly accounting for heavy users of blogging sites. This report is the latest example of comScore innovation in response to the challenges of measuring the Web 2.0 universe, and we’re delighted to be collaborating with Federated Media on
this important measurement initiative."

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