Marketers like to measure stuff. And indeed a most telling way to measure stuff is your ROI. The Return on Investment has been a trusted way to check that you are indeed making money.

Now a new dilemma: With social media becoming a more acceptable marketing channel, how can you measure its contribution towards the ROI?

OMMA Magazine investigated this in a recent article, and here are the suggestions they shared:

1. Track New Customer Acquisitions: “If you can get an idea of their purchase path, you can figure out what is bringing them to your site.” New Customer Acquisitions also helps in long-term planning, and can help make a case for developing non-brand strategies, especially if you find non-brand keywords are bringing customers to your site.

2. Track Order IDs: Use Order ID’s to tell which of your online campaigns or programs drove new customers to buy. If you track Order ID’s, you can determine which of your media touchpoints initiated, influenced and closed the sale.

3. Measure Traffic Across Multiple Channels: Where are your customers interacting with your brand? Are they signing up for newsletters or promotions, sharing on Facebook, or forwarding to a friend? Measure them, then move to the next step below.

4. Track the ROI of various elements on your website: Although this may be a challenge, you can develop at least an idea of which areas of your website are leading to sales. By doing so, you’ll be able to track ROI at a very specific level.

The customer interactions on your web campaigns don’t have to be left out of the ROI. Use these multiple metrics to help bolster your ROI by 1) evaluating the true benefit of your online ad spends, and 2) helping you allocate your budget where it will drive the most overall benefit.

++++++

Thanks to OMMA Magazine for sharing this information.

Monday, November 23rd, 2009, 8:33 am   |   General Marketing, Internet, Social Media  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback