Tonight, I'm throwing out a hypothesis about social media participation & social media marketing:
The majority of marketers who engage in social media do so NOT because it produces greater ROI (professionally), but because the metrics are more immediately tangible and emotionally rewarding.
Social media engagement, whether it's building a name for yourself on Twitter, growing your connections on Facebook, increasing the number of followers on Digg or ratcheting up your popularity in a niche service or forum, produces some very compelling results. Changing some title tags, tweaking internal links or writing an article on a boring, business-relevant subject may bring more direct financial ROI per hour invested, but the metrics don't FEEL as emotionally rewarding.
I'll show, rather than tell.
Let's say I put in some effort attracting more relevant visitors to my site. I see that a certain phrase is sending good quality traffic via my analytics and decide to pursue a higher ranking for that keyword. I do a bit of external link research, find some good places for a listing, maybe acquire a small handful of external links. I tweak the title tag, the H1 and a bit of the page content and make the call to action more prominent and compelling. I find a few important pages on my site (the top pages tool is bad-ass for this) and place some good internal links. My rankings rise a few positions and I see more traffic the next week.
My conversions go up, and my company makes a few hundred more dollars in signups every week thereafter. I can track my progress through analytics:
Now, to a CFO or a manager concerned with the bottom line, that's a beautiful thing. To see 59 conversions this week vs. 53 from last week means an improvement of more than 10% for an investment of only a day's work. Repeat that process and you've got something amazing on your hands.
But... To a marketer, from a selfish, emotional, human standpoint, it's not nearly as gratifying as even the most superficial social media engagement.
Let's say that instead of spending that day alone in my world of SEO and conversion optimization, I venture out into the realm of social media. I decide that I need to grow my social account's reach so that when I broadcast messages, they reach a larger audience, when I reach out to my network, I can find more influential contributors, when I paste links, more people click them. From a marketing perspective, these are all good, relevant, valuable things.
But let's be honest - the thing marketers (and humans as a whole) love about social media is the way the metrics present themselves:
My Facebook feedback loop shows me lots of new friend requests, event invitations, group invitations, status updates from my network and images where people have tagged me.
Twitter shows me what the SEO community is thinking about and how they're talking about my brand.
StumbleUpon shows statistics about what types of content are bringing visits and positive/negative reviews.
Now, I can come up with logical and entirely factual reasons why reviewing and answering all of these is important. I can legitimately justify why updating my status and adding more people to my friend list, replying to feedback and building up relationships are valuable to branding, marketing and bottom line metrics for the company. In fact, I've even got statistics to prove that our site derives value from social media:
There's Twitter at the bottom of the list, bringing 10K+ visits to our site! That's huge, right?
Here's the problem... It's also the lowest converting traffic of any referral source - less than half that of aggregate Google referrals.
I grant that direct referrals are never the whole story, and that there is real branding, marketing and user acquisition value to the traffic, participation and effort spent in social media. What I worry about is whether these intangibles are worth the expenditure.
In every one of the social media cases, the feedback and the metrics are coming from real people that I can reply to, hear back from and strike up a conversation with. The lonely days of lines & numbers as the only recompense for my marketing efforts are at an end. When I engage in social media marketing, I don't feel like an SEO geek, toiling against an algorithm and an anonymous search audience. I feel like a social butterfly, blossoming in the world of Twitter & Facebook, the same outlets the media is raving on about all day long (when not obsessed with swine flu, that is).
The trouble isn't that social media is useless. It's that a dichotomy exists between the financial & business value of certain marketing efforts and the psychological quality of the associated metrics:
|
|
Bottom-Line ROI |
Metrics |
| Social Media Marketing |
Low to Moderate |
Emotionally rewarding, immediate, personal |
| Classic SEO & Web Marketing |
Moderate to High |
Dry, time-consuming to gather, primarily numeric |
We're all human, and few of us are immune from the emotional baggage that comes with that designation. It's hard to put in 8 hours of classic keyword research, content creation and link building and see results several weeks later through a series of lines and figures when applying those same 8 hours blogging, twittering could earn a couple hundred responses, 30 retweets and 18 new followers. The feedback loop is immediate, direct, personal and fulfilling. It feels good to be recognized, to be listened to, to be engaged - that's how our minds work and there's little use fighting it.
I'm just suggesting that we might want to be extra careful about distributing our time and energy in the places it can earn the best ROI. At least... most of the time :-)
p.s. This is just my personal opinion, so I'd love to hear what you think. I recognize that SMM, when it achieves dual goals of traffic & link building, is of massive value (as are other activities designed to leverage the social web to bolster high ROI tactics), but I'm more skeptical of the ROI from social networking & driving up social media popularity.
One problem I've noticed with SEO/MMO/Blogging Advice sites is they often extrapolate experiences they have to the rest of the world without considering if there are things about their niche and their audience which are unique and cannot be applied to the internet as a whole. They run sites appealing to a very web savvy audience and people with a financial motivation for solving particular problems.
Sites focused on entertainment or news have a totally different audience. They rely less on SEO and more word of mouth. A niche like webcomics has an enormous audience, yet the main object of consumption can't even be indexed by search engines.
My site is entertainment related and social media blows SEO out of the water for me. In terms of strict ROI, time spent linkbuilding vs time spent on twitter, it is a no brainer. Even if conversion rates are higher from search engines, the raw numbers are so much greater from social media for me it makes the investment worth it. Its the difference between fishing with a line and reel vs fishing with a net.
Social media is also cheap. You don't have to hire a social media firm to do social media optimization. You also don't have to worry so much about everything being destroyed by a single company changing its mind.
I agree. I can't help but feel that time spent on Twitter and Facebook is time that is somewhat wasted. There is some value to building your network, but like Rand suggests, we should be careful about where we invest our time and energy.
I have started imposing "time outs" to help me focus on the real work I need to get done. I close tweetdeck, shutdown my email, and close facebook for a few hours. I'll set a time limit from 1:00pm to 4:00pm for example. At 4:00 I'll check and respond to email, and see what's happening on Facebook and Twitter. Then I'll shut everything down again for a couple more hours before my work day is done. This really helps to increase my productivity.
Gotta agree here. I think if you factor in the amount of time taken to get any social media profiles up and running (i.e. - enough people following to make time spent posting on them worthwhile), it just seems like an awful lot of time spent for minimal tangible gain.
I like the way you have laid out this post Rand, giving a more reasonable argument for social media than I have been able to create myself. I agree it is something we probably should all do but I guess I just have to try a bit harder to convince myself.
Gonna have to agree with David here, unless you can put yourself in a vacuum and do some real testing this is hard ... but ...
I love this experiment. It shows, to me at least, that social media is more about branding and word of mouth rather than true conversions. If you think about it, social media is just the online version of word of mouth. People can talk about you a hundred times to their friends, but the friends will only purchase when they are ready.
Search is almost always going to have a higher conversion rate because people are looking for your product or service. Their intentin search is different than twitter. Twitter is about passing around information and getting people interested.
It's going to be the blend of all online mediums that is going to produce the best results of course. Rand, you make a great point that the companies and indviduals relying on social media only, or are spenign more money/time there, for traffic and business are going to be sorely disappointed.
"It's going to be the blend of all online mediums that is going to produce the best results of course."
I absolutely agree. To use an agricultural metaphor, word of mouth prepares the ground and plants the seed--it's rarely the harvester. I think that's inherent in the context of social media (or live word of mouth, for that matter.)
Nobody wants to turn into a used car salesman on their friends, online or off. We suggest, we rave, we rant--but we don't put the hard sell on, because suddenly that puts a monetary value on the friendship, and it will poison the friendship--every time. Ick.
And to Rand's point of the emotional draw of social media ... it begs a greater question about why we work, and whether money is ever adequate compensation, all by itself, for our time. We're social beings with social needs. If we can meet those needs and reap SOME business benefit, I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think to a large degree, it's a response to the cubicleization of the average worker. But that's a really off-topic discussion.
Anyone who keeps an eye on the affiliate marketing world can tell you that twitter is the worst possible conversion rate. As spammy or "sales obvious" as they may be, when it comes to conversion and efficient leads... our affliate brothers have it to a science.
Although I could never get away with an affiliate style landing page for a clients site... I wish I could boast 30% conversion rates.
Even with the huge buzz of social media, affiliate marketers are still sticking to Organic search and highly optimized ppc.
Hey Rand,
Good post. I noticed that my website, socialseo.com, is sending the least amount of traffic from your referring domain snapshot above but it's the highest conversion @ 9.31%. When I saw that I was like WTF, why so high? I'm almost certain it's the SEOmoz banner on our website right column but I got a warm, fuzzy feeling knowing how much higher our conversion rate was over even search engine journal and Google ;-)
The only thing I'd add to your article above is that I feel that social media's numbers are set to grow by a huge percentage since we're only talking a couple of years or less for the total growth of popularity for several of the more talked about social sites like Twitter, etc. I feel these sites and others like them are poised to grow more and in uncountable ways versus traditional SEO.
So, while distributing our time and energy to them today might not seem to be the same payoff as traditional SEO, the growth potential or spread I think is larger over the next 1 to 3 years. I think the types of connections, referrals, and business lead generation overall is also quite different and in many cases converts higher once another Twitterer (or a few) has forwarded a handful of leads - not just direct traffic like your referring sites snapshot shows above. Referras through direct "connections" seem more solid IMO.
I also think of algo. influences like Google's recent "brand" update. I think social sites might provide more than your post elludes to simply because Google has to quantify the growth and usage of sites like Twitter, FB, StumbleUpon, etc, etc. In my opinion, one can only go so far branding themselves via their own website. If Google is going to use social media sites as a real metric of value, especially over time, then I don't think any of us can ignore or slow down within the social media sites for fear of losing some market share. I think this recent "brand" update is only the start of many similar ones.
Social Media Marketing is about building relationships, which usually have an effect on the ROI but it is not as "fast" and "visible" as SEO could be (ok, relatively fast). It is just like when your company make donations to charity: you can't expect a great ROI for this action, but you can get additional reputation, branding and media coverage that will impact the ROI sooner or later. Besides, SMM can be a great concept if you want to build word of mouth campaigns. And word of mouth promotion is invaluable.
Rand,
This is the best post I've read anywhere in a good while. We don't always agree, but man do I agree with you here.
Naturally, there are some cases where social media is essentially a piece of a link building campaign, and in that case you can justify the ROI of it quite easily. In that case what you are doing should almost be called "link building" rather than "social media" if you are doing it for the main purpose of building links for SEO benefit. It gets to be a gray area when you are allocating the benefit as 50% branding and networking and 50% link building for SEO.
This all said, while there are specific arguments against your point I believe that you are dead right in the majority of cases. I will easily confess that every hour I spend on social media is probably only 1/3 as productive as every hour I spend doing hardcore keyword research, on-site optimization, link building, etc. But social media is more fun and more immediately rewarding. So I spend way more time on it than I should. Such is my struggle...
I think there's a ton of great comments, and most of them seem to disagree with an assertion that I didn't intend to make. I really did not want or try to say:
Nor did I try to say:
What I tried to say is:
Does that make better sense?
One thing to consider as well, is the client aspect of "hey, on CNN they were talking about twitter... i need that" Often times it is easier and more profitable (although arguably unethical) to simply provide the services requested than provide the right services.
I have a number of clients that are trying to jump on the Twitter bandwagon at the moment. I believe it's our job as their SEO and SMM consultants to give them good advice in this area. If they have a blog, and are regularly producing excellent content that people in their niche will care about, then building a following on Twitter could be an additional method to promote that content to their community. If it's a client with a 10 page brochure website about the plumbing valves product they manufacture, then I ask them to consider the question "What are you going to be writing about on Twitter? Do you have someone in house that will manage the account and post regularly? Why would someone care to follow you on Twitter?".
If they can't answer these question, and I can't suggest anything worthwhile for them to write, then I don't think there is any value for them to be on Twitter and I advise them to focus their energy on other strategies.
Hi Rand, I think that clears up some of the confusion.
For my comment above I also should've also added that even though SMM might not be the best marketing channel when looking at raw or in-depth conversions or ROI, I think most marketers today will take advantage of whatever slivers of of traffic/leads they can get.
I'm sure most marketers have not really taken the time to look into the ROI as deeply as you have above, but you're right -- there is a definite pro-biasing and personal gratification role dictating the huge involvement from marketers and SEOs within these sites, regardless of the ROI payoff. Balance and measurement is key. If these are over-looked then you're wasting your time. It would be interesting to take a look at the ROI from across a dozen or more industries, but making sure that there are some clear baselines to get data from.
I will say that I've noticed that the ROI is different depending on what industry you're promoting or managing. The stats/conversions via trackable links show this pretty clearly. Maybe that would make for a good article in itself.
No doubt. People like social reinforcement so they are using social networks sites.
However, business don't care about social renforecement, they see the SNS as a great marketing channel which reach to very unique potential clients. The problem is that SNS require excitement as much as skills. This is why you won't see big companies thrilling their followers.
Unless, you have never advertised on social media sites, you can not argue with the fact that social media traffic (esp. Myspace/Facebook types) convert at a fraction of other channels (email, search, direct etc).
Add on it, the requirement of continuously remaining on top of all your friends/tweets etc, which never scales.
Unless you do it for vanity purposes more than ROI (which is the reason why people are putting money online vs offline - right?), it will be hard to justify the need to hire a person to manage twitter/facebook profile for your company. Especially, when same dollars can be spent on business development with companies with a more direct & long term ROI.
I agree on 1 thing though with many comments, there is a huge potential and we all need to watch it closely.
Thanks for this post Rand. As a beginning SEO I am struggling to decide how to spend my time for the maximum ROI. It seems like successfully using social media to drive high converting traffic is a huge effort. Based on this post, I think I will focus on other areas of link building first to increase rankings and maybe deploy a social media component later.
great post Rand.
first of all i'm working in SEM and i optimize for clients' ROI on a daily basis.
my thoughts:
whether SMM is worth the hype depends firstly on how we are measuring it's effectiveness.
Measured against Paid Search, the dividends from conversions would be lower.
Measured as a form of PR, and the dividends from a saved potential PR disaster through putting out a company's point of view on Twitter could save jobs.
If I'm not wrong, what you are trying to say is that we must not overrate SMM, but must judge it fairly for the returns that we can get out of it.
I'd like to say that when emotional connection is needed with your audience, SMM is unparalleled in the digital platform. having this emotional connection plays a part, just like Apple's branding efforts plays its part in getting Mac enthusiasts and evangelists - even though i'm not sure how we can directly attribute it to hard sales figures.
So guys, i think we must know that we are not comparing or slamming SMM or other more hard ROI driven platforms.
We should see how all of them fit in the marketing mix.
Chill~
Lydia
I couldn't agree more... wonderful post Rand.
The emotional compensation of SMM is dependent on the participant. Some do and some don't feel emotionally rewarded by SMM when compared to SEO/M.
I learn a lot on Twitter & I'm not actively selling anything. My SMM interaction is adding value to my SEO package so that I can get a better ROI on my efforts. How do you weigh that into the equation?
Also, there are people out there who do really well with SMM ROI ... Twitter being by far the best converting referrer. With that in mind, much of the ROI/convertability is dependent on the product in relation to the communication medium.
The bottom line is that Twitter is fun, Facebook is fun, and social media in general is just a lot more entertaining and enjoyable than doing traditional SEO. I agree we may try to justify spending a little extra time on these channels because we enjoy doing it.
It's important to take a step back every so often and examine why we're involved in social media, what our goals are as a company/website/individual and whether our social media efforts are helping us accomplish those goals.
The main goal doesn't necessarily have to be short term ROI and I would argue, for most companies anyway, short term ROI would not be the most appropriate goal for a social media campaign. It's easy to spot the people using social media solely as a short term revenue generator. They're called spammers. :)
- Evan
I'd have to add that most social media sites's updates, replies, etc.. are searchable so will overlap into GoogleYahoo/whatever results. For example, I post an @ to a web designer friend of mine. The designer is at the middle level in terms of hit counts. I'm at the top. Someone searches my name or the subject matter of the post and, since I'm high on the search engines, my reply is on the first page of the search results. Because Twitter makes names a link, my designer friend just hit the top as well.
Another example of the point: I'm a lower echelon blogger. I comment on a higher echelon blog I read. The comment automatically is posted in FriendFeed, including a link to the site. Fans of the blogger who subscribe to my FF or are just searching randomly for keywords on FriendFeed hit my comment and then hit the link, giving me 'Google juice' on their way to read the story. They may even comment on my brief analysis of the blog post. It's not that easy to guage social media's impact on one's marketability. Professionals are trying to narrow the focus, but they're not there yet.
Social Media is truly tough to judge, but like all marketing activity has a factor of value and one of waste. Determining which outweighs another in terms of marketing efforts probably depends heavily on the industry/vertical you are in.
Also, I still believe tieing in social media with SEO and even traditional marketing efforts can have some serious benefit in the form of getting "immediate" social results and feedback (which can guide PR and even content development) as well as the latent search results we all strive for in our projects. Together the value I am sure is powerful, seperate, perhaps not so much (except for SEO which in my mind can run independently, but only gains strength with other disciplines/tactics applied.
The thing about online social media is that it offers an alternative way of generating business. For those SMEs which are not particularly good at generating conversions through other online methods (SEO, PPC etc...), SMO is a good way of helping the business. When more conversions are achieved, then money can be re-invested in optimizing other marketing methods. I've found this to be true particularly for start-ups.
Social Media provides a bit more ROI than you imply. It's a great way to do research: if you spend time on Twitter, Yahoo! Answers, LinkedIn Answers, etc., you're going to find out what questions you didn't know potential customers were asking, what services they're looking for, and how you and your competitors are viewed.
This is valuable information. By running an active social media campaign, you get it for less than you would if you hired a market research company. In addition, you'll get information from active social networkers -- people who are more likely to have an outsize influence, and to be early adopters (especially with SEO).
Finally, social media compounds in a way SEO doesn't. When people see your brand being discussed, they'll be more willing to discuss it. That means more free marketing from them, and more free market research for you.
(And one other thing: right now, social media mentions are hard for search engines to index and use. That's going to get easier, they're going to do more of it, and the Twitter- and Facebook-based conversation about your brand is going to show Google that it's an important one.)
You're mismeasuring your results, and you're missing out.
Enjoyed your post! I believe that those who decide to develop an engaged network with social media will have much better results than those mentioned in your Twitter example. Sometimes we might think all we need to do is create a Twitter (or other social media) account, feed a few blog posts to it here and there, and the traffic will come running. I think, as with most things, you get out of social media what you put into it. Relationships are nurtured, over time.
Follow people, have conversations, retweet interesting posts, let people get to know you personally....those are simple ways to build community at social media sites like Twitter, and the results are quite trackable and measurable. In the long term I believe those kinds of clicks will be much more valuable than search engine clicks, as a warm lead beats a cold lead every time (which might be one reason google is stumbling over themselves to figure out a way to buy Twitter :) ).
I do SEO every week and I use social media every week and I would say that my experience is just the opposite from your graph: classic SEO low to moderate; SMM moderate to high.
Just thought I'd add another perspective - Tks for a thought provoking post! @JimQuillen
There is no way to put a metric on Social Networking. Everything you do to promote your brand ads up to more than the sum of the parts. When you are building and/or maintining a reputatuion you are fostering sales that will happen later. Sometiems much later. Big brands make sales every day based on advertising they did 30-50 years ago. SEOMoz is a brand. You speak at conferences and write articles. Those things get passed around.
In your industry there is a ton of new SEO's hitting the market every day. They are broke and can't afford your services. One day they might get better at what they do and will one day work at a place where they are asked what tools the company should use.
When you do social networking you get peole to go to google and type in your brand. They might even type in an unbranded keyword that you worked hard to rank for. They may not have searched for that term had you not done some social networking.
Everything I said is very specific to SEM business. Social networking could be a complete waste of time for some companies.
Excellent Post.
In marketing, you always have the problem of convincing decision makers to choose the options that generate the biggest ROI vs the options that are interesting to them yet have smaller ROI.
Sometimes, the most rational option isn't the most appealing.
Daniel Faintuch
https://amarketersview.com
Great look at social media! This article comes at the perfect time to spark my creativity and analysis of our own data for an eCommerce panel I'll be on next week.
My experiences with social media marketing is you gotta "entice" prospective and current customers to the social media aspect of your business.
What I have done in the past, is offer customers a discount on their current/ or future order if they write a review or comment on the busineesses twitter or facebook page.
This adds a lot of validitiy to your business site as well! Everybody is happy!
I offer Social Media Management services to my freelance clients. I do this by incorporating social media/bookmarking websites in to my link building strategies.
I have not been able to identify a ROI for Social Media via analytics however, their site traffic has increased and that has (in part) helped the organic optimization and popularity. Together, these two elements may have also contributed to recent increase in page rank. I see the Social Media Management as PR for clients and their website.
@Robert Enriquez - Social Media is not just a pole but rather a piece of the net.
Great post. We've tried a lot of things to determine effectiveness of social campaigns. Yet stake holders are still likely to use feelings to detail success or failures.
Twitter is amazing for getting the word out but awful at getting anyone to do anything. The short format means people are in a mood to consume (like a whale vacuuming up krill) but have no time to act upon what they see. StumbleUpon, FF, FBfeed are the same. Another note twitter's site traffic is about 50% of the API traffic. I'm sure the conversion rates are the same, but it's a bigger funnel than just the twitter.com traffic.
When people are searching they are trying to solve a problem and ready to act when their hunt is done. So SEO is still king for that.
That said, Twitters goal of becoming a search engine as reported by Rafe Neddleman (https://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10235360-2.html) based upon the in-twitter links and the authority of the people that posted them could make for a very interesting blend.
Thanks again for the great post.
Social media does not seem that hard, just seems to take so much times and resources to get right.
Hi Rand, Nice post again.
"Social Media enters the SEO equation". I viewed your interview on social media management through the WebProNews videos. That was really an effective one. I believe SMM can give me better ROI regarding sales. Basically Twitter is a great channel to announce news and for providing better customer service too. SMM is great to create buzz and always adds value to SEO.
Social Media to me is like a fisherman who fishes with a couple of poles in the water...
SEO is more like throwing in a net to try to catch the whole school of fish.
Those that do Social Media fishing with a couple of poles are those that will tell you the best fish stories, and how they caught 'the big one'
Those that do SEO fishing by netting just see it as commercial fishing, and have no stories to tell....just will tell you how much $$$ they made
I like the concepts you bring up here Rand, and think it is the way a lot of Search Marketers approach the concept of Social Media.
The way social is moving though it is becoming more intertwined with search. Links, user data, everything we do in the social realm as marketers has a direct impact on search. For this reason, we cannot simply look at the direct conversions from social as the ROI, but must look at the holistic value of the process in terms of its ROI across channels.
I think at the end of the day its about what you get out of it to what you put into it. Many have talked about twitter search and how great it is but have you tried to get listed for "SEO" on twitter search and actually last more than 2 mins in the top 10? What did you get for it may be a follower or 2?
Its worth having your profiles and adding them should you do a blog post or something worth it but I rather spend the time doing good old fashion link building till proven other wise.
along the same lines, my take on twitter for all you twitter kings: Twittering for bad karma - the entrepreneurs five-step plan
-eric
Interesting article! I think it also depends on how the social media is being used. A lot of people are wasting time on Twitter and Facebook because they're not using a (longterm) strategy and using it for entertainment or as a habit.
When you have a great social media strategy it can give good/great results, but I do think it's more usefull for branding than getting a high ROI in terms of sales.
I personally believe that, in the end, 'traditional' SEO/PPC will give you the best results/ROI.. but it's hard to count out the effects of social media just because the conversion isn't great right away. The only way to know for sure is to go 'cold turkey' and not use social media at all, would be interesting to see what the effects would be after a couple of months.
I agree with Gunneweg's sentiments, but I think the binary response of one form over another is incorrect. All of these activities work better together than they do alone. True measuring synergy is not the easiest thing to do, but if someone builds a personal connection with me, I'm going to be more likely to buy a product from a company that they happen to work for. (not talking shallow stuff, but real connections).
Similarly, if a person gives me useful knowledge, I'm more likely to do something with that advice.
If a cheerleader on FB or twitter or a blog tries to hype me up about clean drinking water or a ford focus or some other thing, I'm going to tune it out just like a commercial on tv or the radio.
step 1 - personal connection
step 2 - reinforcement
....
step x - through some channel the opportunity is presented and seized
I just want to admit that I have skipped over all comments so this may have been said but it’s just my 2 cents. :)
/start ramble
Rand - I agree with you some but I also disagree with you. From the surface it appears that Google is beating Twitter and other sources hands down, but how do you know? These are just the final stats you are looking at and not the whole conversation.
I just came in via Twitter but I know of your brand via meeting you and the team at conferences and other various ways. If I was to convert right this second, how would you count that conversion? You could look in your analytics and point to Twitter. Score one for TWITTER!
However, what about all the other touch points? What about the novice user that knows zilch of your company and happens to come along via SU and goes WOW, great post. They end up book marking the article as something to read later. A few days/weeks/months pass and they are researching that topic again and find the bookmark. They proceed to click and go DANG; they have this new tool set that does exactly what I need. They click and sign up. How do you track them? It should be to Google but it wouldn’t.
The problem with Analytics and judging things based on last touch conversions is that it is based on the last touch and we as humans are not (usually).
The same goes with the head vs. long tail keywords. The long tail converts but if the user knows zero about you....then what? You are just some random site that happened to pop up in the SERPs. But what if you had engaged them in some manner and they recalled your company name while looking over the SERPs?
So whether you use first/last touch with your analytics you miss things. No matter how we track ROI we will miss things. I think the best way is to engage your audience as much as you can prior to and after they become a customer. We can use analytics to measure the best we can and later engage with them to go back and try and fill in the blanks that technology and data have missed.
/end ramble
nice post Rand.
All comments were very engaging and enlightening. Helpful to me, as an intermediate level (aka newbie) at SEO, and very happy to have found this site, along with all the fantastic comments here. I have a ton to learn.
Have definitely found a business benefit to using Tweetdeck for searching the buzz on important keywords in my vertical mkt. Good for connetcting the dots to create a larger picture of where my emeerging market is going & growing (LEVs = electric bikes & scooters).
Based on the comments here I'll turn off the deck for occassional checks, instead of spending 10min of every 40 checking and following the links to "related" topics.
Actually, A Twitter link is how I landed here...who'd a thunk. I'll be back!
Sorry Rand - I couldn't let this one go by without picking it apart. My comment is too long to put here so had to post it on my own blog
https://cli.gs/HonestSocialMedia
Jenn
Thanks Jenn! You made a great post (so I made your link live in the comment) - also left you a comment :-)
Good luck with SIS.
The longer I spend doing this, the more this rings true. I've worked on enough interesting stuff now to know the difference between a 4th place ranking and a top one or two in terms of traffic (and that we didn't get there via Twitter), and have seen enough work after the fact to know that an improvement in conversions from on-site work wasn't due to how many people bought into the curious idea that the ranking mobile phone provider was interested in a conversation. The only conversation they're interested in is one takes place on one of their mobile phones.
People Googled something and clicked on the first desirable link. This also has absolutey nothing to do with whether anyone bought into the <vomit>personal brand</vomit> of the person who wrote the meta tags.
Rank well enough for the right terms with the right website and that's how it works. However, I'll make a distinction: all that tweeting and messing about on Facebook isn't the same as recognising when someone has a business that could stand to benefit from doing some social media work. It's up to you as a marketer to know what sort of things will work, given the business. Know its benefits and its limits, do the work like you would when figuring out where the next round of links should come from, how they should be acquired and what their anchor text should say, and be objective about the reactions and the potential return.
There is so much shit on Sphinn about getting more votes on Sphinn, more followers on Twitter, choosing your avatar (WHAT?!) and generally wasting your time. Ironically, someone on Twitter summed up how I feel about the social media nonsense pretty damn well.
Hi Rand,
I'm not usually a frequent inhaler of SEO blog posts but yours was interesting and curious. I come from the SMM side of the tracks and, as a former decades-long database marketing analytics nerd, appreciate the value of harder ROI metrics. Lots of interesting comments, my only addition would be to create specific goals for any social media marketing initiative. For example, specific links for lead generation (for which a proxy $ figure can be derived) or peddling deals through Twitter (a la Dell) creates the closed loop that is so often missing in nascent social media marketing efforts. With direct marketing, it was easy (hence the name) - not impossible in the social media marketing world.
For the record, I hear you - in this economic environment, focusing solely on the "I" in "ROI" is not going to cut it with more conservative companies with shrinking marketing budgets!
Dean Westervelt
Social Media Analytics, Collective Intellect
I agree that direct referrals are never the whole story so why do we always give all the credit to the last click? How much did your social media efforts assist in not only driving traffic, conversions as well as improving customer loyalty?
Try this, quit being social at all, go into a pre social media mode of being alone in your world of SEO and conversion optimization. I'm sure you'll soon realize that your ROI on social media isn't as low as you think it is.
My advice would be to keep putting enough effort into social media to keep the momentum going and buy those socialseo.com guys a drink or two!
David - I'm not endorsing ignoring social media or staying out of the conversations around your brand. I'm simply asking whether we do a good job accurately recognizing value from the different forms of Internet marketing we undertake and warning against the dangers of the very compelling (but not always high ROI) metrics produced by social networking engagement.
But yes - definitely need to get some beers out :-)
No and I certainly didn't think you were advocating that. I guess I was just thinking that you're not really getting the true picture by strictly measuring the conversion based on the last referral. Like you said there is "real branding, marketing and user acquisition value to the traffic" to consider and I don't think those "intangibles" are truly viewed. So if you quit doing social media you might see an overall drop in all the conversion rates (except socialseo.com, lol) Hope that makes sense.
Yeah - and I did not mean to suggest that we're naive enough to use the last click as an accurate metrics (which is precisely why I provided the follow-up caveats).
As far as dropping social and seeing across-the-board drops; interesting hypothesis, but tough to implement. We could certainly look at weeks where we were too busy to engage externally (during conferences, travel, crunch dev weeks, etc.) but there's almost always noise at these times, too.
@randfish arent you guys running IndexTools for your web analytics software, i thought that allowed for engagement mapping that solves the solution to @davidtemples question around credit for last click?
ive found that social media is another source of traffic, but it is usually highly qualified, if you are tweeting about seo/sem and someone visits your website it is likely they have an interest or requirement for those services.
the engagement between tweeters actually seems to be better for promotional/branding with some nifty side benefits such as more engaging blog comments/articles about your brand.