It is often assumed that because various social media marketing platforms and the web applications themselves do not provide a way to uniquely target or track individual behaviour, that you can’t measure your social channel, like measuring the effectiveness of specific billboards you need to put it all down to the Halo Effect of marketing. WRONG.

To truly measure a channel (beyond last click revenue attirbution – useful but flawed) you really need to be able to separate out customers who are engaged in your various channels. As an example, you can compare Life Time Value (LTV) of your email opt-out base and compare it to your opt-in base. You will find a difference. Email opt-ins are a self selecting group who are naturally more engaged. So you need to:

  1. Establish the delta
  2. Remove the background noise
  3. Measure again in a month
  4. Measure again in a month
  5. …

From a data perspective you should track visits coming from social sites and flag those users as socially engaged. In terms of measuring the success of the channel, once we can identify users who are socially engaged, we need to compare the average LTV of these users compared to those who are not engaged and  not clicking through via social links. Tracking the difference over time will tell us the true impact of our activity from a revenue perspective.