New Research on Social Marketing Analytics

Posted on April 22, 2010October 25, 2019 by Eric Peterson

I’ve been awaiting this day with eager anticipation for some time now because we are finally releasing our paper on Social Marketing Analytics. Several months ago Eric Peterson and I started talking with Jeremiah and Altimeter Group about the issues facing social marketers. Despite the red hot flames trailing anything with the word social in it, the outlook for effectively measuring the effects of social marketing initiatives in a meaningful way was somewhat grim.

A lack of standardization, reckless experimentation, and unanswered calls for accountability were plaguing businesses who were working in earnest to embark on their social marketing activities. After some intense discussions and some creative thinking, we decided to collaborate on a research project that would leverage social media strategy from Altimeter Group and digital measurement rigor from Analytics Demystified. The result is a framework for measuring social media that we’re happy to share with you today. If you’re into this stuff, please drop us a note or give a call to get involved in the conversation.

Introducing the Social Media Measurement Framework

There’s no denying that social media is the hottest sensation sweeping the globe today. Yet, marketers must see past the shiny object that is social media and start applying a pragmatic approach to measuring their efforts in the social space. We developed a framework that starts with a strategy that requires solid business objectives. From there, specific measures of success – that we call Key Performance Indicators – provide a standardized method for quantifying performance.

Mapping Business Objectives to KPIs

Our report identifies four social business objectives that include: Foster Dialog, Promote Advocacy, Facilitate Support and Spur Innovation. While, there may be others that apply to your business, we view these as a solid foundation for beginning the measurement process. In the report we align KPIs to these social business objectives and offer real formulas for calculating success.

Foster Dialog: Share of Voice, Audience Engagement, Conversation Reach
Promote Advocacy: Active Advocates, Advocate influence, Advocate Impact
Facilitate Support: Resolution Rate, Resolution Time, Satisfaction Score
Spur Innovation: Topic Trends, Sentiment Ratio, Idea Impact

We encourage you to download the full report here to get the complete context and actual formulas for these KPIs.

Social Marketing Analytics: A New Framework for Measuring Results in Social Media

View more documents from John Lovett.

Note: This report was a collaborative effort by Analytics Demystified and Altimeter Group and as such there are two versions of this report. The content is identical, yet we each published under our own letterhead.

This is Open Research…

We made a conscious decision not to accept sponsors for this research and to produce it entirely at our own expense so that we could offer a genuine launching pad for social media measurement to the industry. However, this research would not have been possible without numerous contributions from social media and measurement visionaries. We thank them in the report, but it’s worth mentioning that these contributors helped illuminate the big picture of the challenges and opportunities associated with measuring social. We’re publishing this work under a Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States and encourage practitioners, vendors and consultants to adopt our framework and use it in measuring social media.

We also want to be realistic about this body of work and acknowledge that it does not answer all questions regarding the measurement of social activities. Our hope is that it offers a solid jumping off point for getting started and that each of you in the community will modify and make contributions to improve this method of measurement. We can assure you that we’ll be listening to to your feedback and will continue to update our knowledge based your feedback on this work.

Want to Contribute or Learn More?

Jeremiah and I will be conducting a webcast on June 3rd to reveal the gritty details behind the strategy and framework. Join us by registering here: Attend the no-cost webinar on Social Media Measurement.

We encourage you to embed the Slideshare link into your own sites and I’ll link to others that extend the conversation here as well.

For more white papers from Analytics Demystified, click here. Or to instantly download a PDF of this Social Marketing Analytics report click this GET IT NOW link.

The Altimeter Group blog posting

Social market analytics: the dark side? Posted by Dennis Howlett

Shel Holtz also recognizes “The haphazard means by which we are monitoring and measuring social media…”

cjlambert’s posterous gives us a “like” but remains skeptical on the concept that media can be measured comprehensively

Geoffroi Garon takes the report to his French speaking audience.

Marshall Sponder includes us in his Social Analytics Web Journal write-up. Marshall is also working to implement our KPIs with one of his clients. Here’s Part 1 of his multi-part series.

Kenneth Yeung delivers a fantastic synopsis of our 25 page report with once concise post on his blog, The Digital Letter, with a follow-up post here.

Research Live offered a brief write-up of the research.

@Scobleizer tweeted us! Woot!

Chelsea Nakano references our research in her ambitious post titled Everything You Need to Know About Social Media Marketing.

Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media gives us a shout out. Lisa was also an influencer that we interviewed for the research.

Christopher Berry delivers great questions and thoughts on the research in his Eyes on Analytics blog.

Analytics Strategy, Social Media

Facebook Analytics: Part II – Vendor Solutions

Posted on March 18, 2010October 25, 2019 by Eric Peterson

Earlier this week we described the Facebook Analytics Ecosystem and some of the ways in which businesses can go about measuring components of the social networking empire. Today, we reveal two key pieces of additional information that will help organizations: a. Understand the benefits of measuring Facebook (a necessary element in forming social marketing business objectives) and b. Identify vendors that offer measurement solutions for Facebook.

DISCLOSURE: Analytics Demystified works with many web analytics vendors including some of those discussed in this post. We rarely disclose our clients publicly but for the sake of transparency wanted the reader to know that we do have a financially beneficial relationship with three of these vendors and a mutually beneficial relationship with all four.

Three Business Benefits of Measuring Facebook

To demystify the ways in which businesses can measure, understand and capitalize on the growing Facebook phenomenon, we identified three pillars of Facebook measurement. These three pillars identify the “what”, the “who” and the “cha-ching” of marketing within Facebook.

1. Observe Interactions: What are people on Facebook doing?

This essential component of Facebook measurement includes the ability to track anonymous user information such as visits, friends, comments, likes and exposure across pages, custom tabs and applications. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

2. Understand Demographics: Who are all these people on Facebook? In addition to knowing what they do, it’s important to know who Facebook users are to segment the massive population on attributes such as user ID, gender, age, education level, work experience, marital status or geographic information. Facebook is very protective of user privacy and many limitations apply here as well.

3. Impact Conversions: How can businesses cash in on Facebook marketing? This includes the ability to associate impressions and exposure within Facebook back to conversion events on external sites. And the ability to target advertising within Facebook based on observations and demographic data, while maintaining the ability to track viewthroughs and conversions offsite. This too requires extensive development and fancy footwork to make it happen so we’ll explain shortly.

Vendor Capabilities For Measuring Facebook

As mentioned in Part I of our series on Facebook Analytics, several of the major web analytics vendors are vying for position to deliver Facebook measurement capabilities. While we have not yet reached Facebook directly for comment, we concluded that no single vendor is likely to gain a long-term competitive advantage over the rest of the market for measuring Facebook. The partnership established between Omniture and Facebook does provide some short-term gains because Omniture is able to leverage a direct relationship with Facebook developers to fully utilize data provided by existing APIs; still, all of the vendors interviewed for this research informed us that they were actively engaged in talks with Facebook. Further, Analytics Demystified strongly believes that it is not in Facebooks’ best interest to lock into exclusive vendor agreements or partnerships because of the risk of alienating significant portions of their business population using disparate tools.

Here’s what we know:

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights offers aggregate views of behavioral and demographic data across a number of areas within the ecosystem. The Wall Insights show behavioral and demographic info on unique Fan interactions and all Fan visits. While the offering is great for the price, one thing we heard repeatedly is that the data is sampled and slow in coming, sometimes delayed up to three days.

To Facebook’s credit they appear to be constantly working to improve the quality of insights they provide. Mashable broke unofficial news again this morning by reporting that Facebook is offering more analytics detail to page admins through weekly email alerts. These reports reveal new fan counts, page views comments and likes over the week.

Most useful for: Companies unwilling to invest in “pro tools” for Facebook measurement. Facebook Insights does offer value so if you’ve got no other measurement prospects then what they’re offering is better than no data at all.

Coremetrics

Coremetrics’ Facebook announcement described their ability to determine Facebook’s influence on site visits and conversions, which melds nicely with their impression attribution tool. This slick capability allows Coremetrics to reveal vendor, category, placement and item data collected from within Facebook back to the Coremetrics Analytics interface. They do this using image tags and claim that caching happens infrequently, yet they circumvent these occurrences with cache busters.

Server-side rendering of image tags allows Facebook to segment and report on attributed data. This allows Coremetrics’ users to see how interaction with specific tabs led to web site engagement and conversions. While technically possible for them, Coremetrics hasn’t dedicated focus on reporting user interactions within Facebook in their interface. Instead, they’ve honed in on the ability to understand how the social networking site acts as a feeder channel to their customers’ primary web properties.

Most useful for: Companies heavily focused on Facebook as an advertising channel. Coremetrics is a good choice for clients that are not heavily invested in Facebook, but more interested in understanding how it compliments their other online acquisition marketing efforts.

Omniture

Omniture’s view on measuring Facebook is simple: Understand your audience > Target them with advertising > Optimize the message. They enable this by focusing on the custom tabs, apps and ads within Facebook. Their most recent announcements touted their partnership with Facebook to enable ad creation and demographic targeting directly within their Search Center Plus solution. This works through an Omniture Genesis integration that also enables even more granular behavioral and demographic data collection. We previewed each of these solutions in working demos, and both are scheduled for general release later this year (with the Genesis offering likely tied to the rumored announcements at Facebook f8.) Clients today are targeting with limited profile information specific to gender with product ads.

Omniture has also developed a “Facebook JavaScript” (FBJS) measurement library that allows them to track behavior data natively within Facebook, and despite competitor’s claims Omniture pointed out that they’ve been doing this since May of 2009. They also deploy output and image tags, which occurs less frequently, and for permissioned applications Omniture is collecting a bevy of demographic data that will appear within Discover for slice and dice ability. They’ve also created default segments within Discover showing pathing reports for: visitors acquired from Facebook (conversion); visitors from Facebook (impressions); and known Facebook users (user association).

Most useful for: Companies that have not yet fully determined what their approach towards Facebook will be. Given the breadth of their capabilities Omniture is a good choice for companies looking to better understand how user’s interact with the platform and the demographic make-up of their audience in Facebook, and with the SearchCenter Plus release, Omniture has the potential to dramatically improve customer’s ability to purchase laser-targeted advertising on the platform.

Unica

Unica has been noticeably quiet during the Facebook Analytics Wars but we’re not shy so we called ‘em out and asked them to weigh in on their capabilities. It turns out that they too have been measuring Facebook for some time using both dynamic and static image tags. They’re collecting strictly according to Facebook’s published rules but include unique user IDs and other attributes such as friend counts from visitors to their custom tabs. They also get app data for average viewing time, views, visits and visitors – all passed to Unica’s NetInsight interface.

Unica is taking a very conservative approach to the demographic data and like some others, waiting for a ruling from Facebook before developing capabilities in that area. While that capability is waiting in the wings, Unica’s longer term vision may include integration with their new search technology and conversion pathing visualizations.

Most useful for: Companies using other of Unica’s Affinium products and companies needing in-house analytical capabilities. Unica customers looking to develop or advertise within Facebook should explore the vast customization possibilities with Unica directly.

Webtrends

Webtrends is aggressively working to deliver social analytics solutions to their customers and also walking the Facebook talk. Their own corporate Facebook fan pages are the most developed of all vendors interviewed and they use these pages to test concepts and showcase capabilities. Webtrends also takes a conservative approach to data collection and privacy by adhering strictly to the letter of Facebook law, thus collecting and displaying fewer demographic attributes.

In their own words Webtrends has been “throwing the book” at the Facebook API to obtain as much data as their published documentation allows, which includes: views, visits, bounce rates and time on site for Facebook shares, ads, apps and custom tabs. Webtrends refutes the long-term feasibility and accuracy of image tags and cache busting techniques within Facebook. And they’ve responded by developing a proprietary solution that uses a data call to pass parameters from the data collection API. This method captures all the typical data as well as flash, pop-ups and other custom fields with the potential to do a whole lot more if the data collection restrictions ease. But before you go snooping for details, Webtrends informed us they have filed a patent for this new method of data collection.

Most useful for: Companies that want to gain deep visibility into interactions within the Facebook ecosystem. Webtrends has the potential to be very useful for social media marketers who are actively developing and tracking social media behavior in Facebook.

Questions to ask your vendor…

While some aspects of these Facebook measurement solutions have been around for a while, they are still very much nascent. Nearly all of the capabilities described above – as best we can tell – are deployed via customized consulting engagements with each vendor and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Keep this in mind as you think about pricing, development resources and timing.

Also, because Facebook is changing its rules and these solutions are largely custom consulting jobs, please don’t even think about buying anything before you see it in action. Have the vendor demonstrate the functionality you’re looking for using live customer data. While mock data and in-house examples are fine for some purposes, ask to see real-world data or decide whether you want to be the test subject.

Additionally here are a few questions that we recommend you pose to vendors when seeking out a Facebook Analytics solution:

How long have you had an active measurement solution in place for Facebook?
How many active customers do you have using your Facebook measurement capabilities?
Can we speak with two or three of your customers actively using your Facebook measurement capabilities?
Do you adhere to Facebook’s published data collection, storage and privacy regulations?
Are you using your solution to measure your own Facebook efforts? Can we see your data?
Do you have documented PHP and FBJS libraries that we are able to deploy on our own?
How long, on average, do your Facebook measurement deployments take start to finish?
Do I need to be a customer to purchase your Facebook measurement solution?
Which Facebook profile data can you import into your application? Can we see it in your application?
Which of your solutions are required to leverage your Facebook measurement solution?

As always I welcome your comments, thoughts, and opinions about this exciting aspect of digital measurement. And if you think we got something wrong, please do let us know!

Social Media

Facebook Analytics: Part I – The Measurable Ecosystem

Posted on March 14, 2010October 25, 2019 by Eric Peterson

2010 is shaping up to be the year of social media measurement and March is the month for measuring Facebook. While most of the major analytics vendors have been working on their Facebook measurement capabilities for some time; Webtrends, Coremetrics and Omniture all released significant advancements in their respective abilities to measure and analyze activity within the social networking juggernaut recently. These announcements created a frenzy of curiosity and confusion around what’s possible and what each vendor can deliver, so we were compelled to investigate. However, our inquiries exposed a world of complexity in terms of what’s measurable according to the emerging Facebook rules and exactly how organizations would benefit from measuring behavior within the walled social networking ecosystem.

In this first part of our two part series on Facebook Analytics, we will dissect the Facebook ecosystem of pages, tabs, applications, advertisements, and Facebook Connect functionality to reveal the do’s and don’ts of tracking visitor activity. While it may seem straightforward, some areas of the ecosystem are off limits to traditional tracking, while other areas can be measured with a high degree of detail. But in all cases, 3rd party measurement solutions must play by the Facebook rules, which we’ll begin to describe here. In Part II of this series, we’ll lay out a framework for how businesses can derive value from measuring their efforts within Facebook and we’ll take a deep dive into the specific capabilities of vendors that offer solutions for measuring Facebook today.

The Facebook Ecosystem

The Facebook ecosystem is comprised of many parts, some of which can be customized while others may not. This section will offer a brief description of each component within the ecosystem.

Facebook Page & Tabs

Facebook “Pages” form the skeleton of each company’s presence on Facebook. Within the pages are a series of “tabs” with default (i.e., mandatory) tabs as well as customization opportunities. Default tabs include: the Wall and Info tabs, but additional standard tabs may include Photos, Discussion, Videos, Events, Boxes, etc. In addition to the standard tabs, Custom tabs within Facebook are plentiful. Yet, none of the tabs within Facebook can be measured using traditional JavaScript web analytics tags. This presents huge measurement challenges despite the fact that tabs offer massive opportunity for businesses to create compelling user experiences within Facebook. Mashable did a nice write-up last summer of Killer Facebook Fan Pages, which will give you a good idea of some of the customization possibilities.

Facebook Applications

Applications on Facebook can be developed using a variety of coding languages including PHP, JavaScript, Ruby or Python and Facebook even provides Client Libraries for their API. Applications must be hosted outside of Facebook and they can be stand-alone apps or embedded within custom tabs. Because apps can be developed using standard code, tracking with traditional web analytics methods is possible. It’s important to note that all applications require permission to track data about users (more on this in the next section). More than 500,000 applications are available on Facebook today so clearly they’re popular. Developers can learn more about The Anatomy of an App.

Facebook Advertisements

Facebook ads appear in the right hand column of your Facebook pages and can link to external web pages – or – within Facebook on tabs, applications, events or groups. Ads can be tracked using Facebook Insights or with traditional web analytics tags when the ad links out to external sites by using campaign ID codes. Ads follow a template format and offer some restrictions around size, text and images. Ads can be targeted according to nine filters including age, gender and keywords just to name a few. Ads can be purchased according to impressions or clicks providing options for businesses.

Facebook Share

Facebook share options are surfacing across the web at an astounding rate. Much in the same way that you can share content trough social bookmarking sites or microblog formats, Facebook Share will populate a link within a users Wall page. Adding the Share link requires only one line of code and can drive traffic back to your site. Facebook even makes it simple by offering multiple Share icons to choose from.

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect enables businesses and individuals to extend capabilities of Facebook including their identity and connections to the web at large (e,g., outside the Facebook ecosystem). In other words, Facebook Connect makes sharing content, conversations, images and social comments possible, both inside and outside the walls of Facebook. Some aspects of Facebook Connect are measurable when delivered outside the Facebook ecosystem, yet internal connections likely require custom solutions. Facebook Connect works through a set of APIs that quite frankly have the potential to make Facebook the epicenter of the digital universe. Below is an example of Facebook Connect in action and more examples are available here. I recommend checking out JCPenney’s “Beware the Doghouse” campaign that leverages Facebook Connect for a good laugh and a taste of how Connect can pull content, images and video from Facebook to create a rich multimedia experience.

Why is measuring the Facebook ecosystem so difficult?

Regardless of whether you agree with Facebook’s ideology or not, the company has made a conscious decision to build it’s empire using standard web development practices within its own ecosystem. Unlike standard web pages that are rendered using HTML, Facebook requires that organizations use their markup language called FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to build custom tabs and enable personalized experiences. Further, Facebook does not allow JavaScript to run on any page or tab on load, but instead uses their own solution FBJS (Facebook JavaScript). There’s a developer wiki maintained by Facebook that provides great detail on the Facebook platform located here and the bloggers at PHP, Web and IT Stuff in the UK did a great write-up on the topic of custom tabs as well.

This ain’t your ordinary JavaScript

Because Facebook utilizes its own Markup Language to “empower developers with functionality” and “protect users privacy”, you need to use FBJS if you want to include JavaScript in your custom tabs or applications. This makes tracking using traditional web analytics JavaScript tags impossible. However, some web analytics vendors have developed methods to track visitor information within standard tabs, which we will reveal in Part II of this series. Facebook does offer its own analytics tool called Insights for tracking the default Wall page. It provides reports on exposure, fans, actions and behavior and offers demographic information about visitors to Wall pages and ads. Note that while Insights provides both click-through rates (CTRs) and engagement rate (ETRs), this is sampled data that offers estimates on actual behavior. Data can be exported from Insights to Excel (.xls) or CSV files. Facebook’s development roadmap indicates that more data will be made available through Insights in early 2010. The developer notes also indicate that an API will be available to gain access to data collected within the Insights tool.

The clock is ticking and tracking permission is opt in

To complicate matters, at this time Facebook does not permit the storage of user data acquired from Facebook for more than 24 hours. Although rumors are brewing that this may change. Exceptions to the 24 hour storage rule are documented in the Facebook developer site, but they are far from being crystal clear. Data stored in perpetuity may include User ID, Photo Album ID, email address, primary network ID and several other attributes noted here. This means that despite all the ways that you can get data out of Facebook Insights or through third party methods, their platform policies may prohibit long-term storage of that data. [If you choose to follow those rules]. However, Facebook has opened the floodgates to external measurement solutions for applications and advertisements…if… And this is a big IF… users grant permission to track and store data about them. This authorization is requested using a standard message shown in the screenshot below.

For users who are comfortable with tracking and aware that this happens on nearly every web site out there, it’s really no big deal. But I’m willing to guess that the abandon rate on most permission requests is astronomical. If you’ve got data on Facebook app abandon rates, I’d love to know.

Next steps…

Now that we’ve painted the big picture of the Facebook ecosystem and hinted at what’s possible in terms of measurement, it’s time to explore vendors that can actually measure all these moving parts. We’ll save the juicy details for Part II of this post, but leave you with some food for thought…

Measuring Facebook is no easy task. Despite the fact that over 400 million users access the site regularly, the visibility into the actions, behavior, and demographics is carefully guarded. Each of the vendors we ~~interviewed~~ interrogated was highly sensitive to Facebook rules and the privacy of its citizens.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the ecosystem and if you think I missed anything, which is entirely possible given the complexity of Facebook. I welcome your comments and I hope you’ll visit again soon to learn how a small handful of major web analytics vendors are cracking the Facebook measurement ecosystem.