Social media strategy and ROI ... again!

A recent eMarketer study highlighted that an ROI driven social media strategy was needed before businesses can actually start to invest in and reap the rewards. It was pointed, based on the 2 facts below, that social media users are not seeing the profits as anticipated and that there was a lack of data to support investments:


*  Only 35% are reported to have profited from social media through increased leads – these are also the ones who would invest in a social strategy and have staff dedicated to analyzing social media efforts.
*  The biggest hurdle to social media strategy is the lack of data to measure the ROI and a subsequent executive buy-in for greater investments – nearly 60% cited these as primary reasons for implementing social media strategy.

These are telling facts!

I maintained in this blog that measuring social media can be challenging purely in terms of an ROI model (net of revenue and cost), simply because the scale is not there for a typical business (in my experience). Instead, we need to utilize social media as a means to other insights (users and product) that may contribute to improving ROI through more traditional media – ones where we can easily setup a model to quantify revenue and cost for a net return (my earlier post on this topic:  http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/03/measuring-social-media-user-vs-product.html). 


I believe the social media efforts need to be looked at as pure investment into the future. The immediate benefits can be had from sampling and testing approach I proposed in the above post. Let’s look at social media data to learn more about our products, consumers and competitors, so we can make better decisions about our current marketing efforts. Hint - the consumers may tweet about a certain product feature they don’t like; certain types/demographics of consumers may be more interested in the brand/product; there may be a buzz about the competitive offerings that may need more attention; and so on.

Building the intelligence model from social media may be a simpler way to look at the ROI than trying to build an ROI model which, as the report highlighted, may not be easily done due to lack of data and appropriate mathematical model. 


Other insights, ideas ... please share!

Guide to making Web Analytics more accurate! - rewind

I felt the need to bring this up again as organizations are pushing for better returns from their online strategies and web analytics.

Understanding business imperatives, setting clear goals, defining success metrics, continuous testing and robust/agile implementation is what it all boils down to ... when it comes to effective utilization of web analytics for business improvement.

Below is an excerpt:

A recent eMarketer study identified top issues with the accuracy of analytics. Most prominently, users said they can't drill into the data (42%), and called out the issues with marketing attribution (32%), campaign tracking code (25%) and cross site analysis (20%). These factors become prominent as the business evolves over time and market driven changes are incorporated across the site. However, with some planning and framework, we can define and implement a robust analytics strategy that is flexible and adapts to the evolving business needs and site-wide changes.


Here's the link to the original post: http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2009/11/guide-to-making-web-analytics-more.html

The data is in abundance - looking at what matters and applying for business success is what matters ... happy hunting!

A new approach in 2010

As we head into the New Year, there will be fresh focus on the business outlook than what happened in 2009. A lot of questions need to be addressed first-up, before we get buried in the daily operations - did we achieve the most out of our business analytics efforts in 2009, was the data adequately supportive of our business strategy in 2009, do we have a clear roadmap/plan for 2010, and what relevant metrics and analytics focus in 2010 will help us achieve corporate goals, etc?

Let’s take a moment to know our strategic focus, be it at the corporate level, business unit level, or simply for the team. If we are an analytics shared service team, we need to know the key metrics that will help our business achieve the desired results. If we are a functional team, we need to assess our metrics and sit down with our shared service folks to understand the metrics and outline a process to measure/report/analyze these in the coming months. And if you are a do-it-yourself organization - well, you are over-worked - yet, you need to ensure that your functional success is aligned with analytics goals.

So where should the focus be?

E-Commerce sites may need to look at conversions, CPC rates, click-through rates, etc. Content push sites may need to look at programming efficiencies, click-through rates, repeat visitation, etc. If your goals are a blend of the above, conversions and click-through rates may be more important. Do you have an online video strategy and are the metrics appropriately defined and tracked? What about your social media strategy – are the metrics defined and tracked? Oh, and don’t forget the consumer experience metrics – ease of navigation, bounce rates, engagement depth, etc. will be great success indicators, while A/B testing a great tool to continuously upgrade your site’s experience.

The key will be to understand the business strategy for the year and outline the metrics and analytics approach at the onset – meeting with your leader/executive and setting those benchmarks is very helpful in the beginning of the year and brings focus that helps react to business contingencies. As an example, in 2009, I helped an organization stay on course to beat their OIBDA targets, in spite of the downturn in revenue.

2010 is bound to present much greater opportunities!

Where does conversion suffer?

Only 40% of companies are applying some kind of testing AND targeting to grow consumer engagement and enhance conversion. The technology is often in-house and to top it all, most companies are not sure about what to test, how to test, what metrics to test, what is the timely reporting and format needed and how to apply analytics to the data.

These findings from a survey by Omniture, reveals a lot about the problems we face in the real world. To maximize the return on the online presence, we need to define the testing and targeting strategy, and apply analytics rigor to better understand our consumers’ needs and create opportunities for business growth.

Behaviorally targeted pages with dynamic content result in a 12% lift in conversions, according to the same study – that will be quite a handsome reward for our 2010 online efforts!