1. Do not mess with your onsite metrics:
Offsite visits or page views should not be mixed with your onsite page views or onsite sessions. Let’s say your site gets 2,000 sessions for the day and if there are 500 visits to your Facebook fan page on the same day, do not count the number of sessions as 2,500. Instead clearly differentiate the offsite traffic with onsite traffic and correlate the influences as needed. Coremetrics has an impression tag for this very reason – we do not create sessions, we do not mix traffic.
Here’s a simple impression tag that will fire an impression tag when a Facebook page that contains this img tag is loaded.
<img height=”1” border=”1” width=”1” alt=”” src=”http://data.cmcore.com/imp?tid=17&vn1=4.1.1&vn2=e4.0&ec=ISO-8859-1&ci=9999999&cm_mmc=Facebook-_-FanPage-_-Wall-_-SpringPromotions”>
If you are a Coremetrics customer click here and search for ‘facebook’ under the “download” section to download the Facebook Solution Brief from our support site.
2. Correlate offsite behavior with onsite behavior:
We introduced Impression Attribution as a generic application framework which can measure offsite behavior without any sessions. We didn’t stop right there; we also added the capability to measure the click-through and view-through influence. Now you will ask, “What is view-through influence?” Let me use an example to explain.
On January 5th 2010, John Doe visited the Facebook fan page of a premier retailer, mynotsofavoriteshoes.com.
On January 7th 2010, John Doe visited a Myspace page where an ad from mynotsofavoriteshoes.com was served.
On January 10th 2010, John Doe decides to go to mynotsofavoriteshoes.com by directly visiting the site.
On January 12th 2010, John Doe is searching for socks and sees a natural search landing page from mynotsofavoriteshoes.com and clicks through and browses through many products, and purchases socks.
With our unique Impression Attribution technology, we can measure all impression influences on John Doe for the past 90 days before he visited the site or purchased. You can see the influences based on the first impression on John Doe, last impression, or all impressions with equal or custom weight. Impression Attribution applies to different types of conversions including whitepaper downloads, video views, article views, enrollment/registration, purchases, etc.
Here are two reports showing the Offsite Behavior correlated with Onsite Metrics. The first report is reported with simple impression tags without passing Facebook user details, and the second one is with Facebook user details, where you can apply demographic categorization
3. Collect and semantically categorize the social networking noise to information:
Plan on capturing as much information as possible for analysis. For instance, if you capture tweets, Facebook wall entries, etc., pass those in a marketing attribute like cm_mmca3 and see the patterns of sentences and apply semantic filters to cut through the clutter. Remember, there can be 1000s of messages on Facebook or Twitter; it is not useful to just collect. You need to be able to categorize, report, and observe the trends to gain better insight about how your customers are being influenced in the social media world.
Here’s a report with Semantic Categorization of Social Media. The semantic categorization is done using wild card expressions to scan through the sentences (MMC attributes as an example). For instance, if I see ‘crap’, ‘bad’, etc., mixed with your brand terms and doesn’t contain ‘not’, this can be loosely categorized as negative comments.
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Thank you for reading my thoughts on this subject. Would love to hear from you if you are tracking Facebook as a effective Marketing channel or planning to do so in the near future.
