Show Me The Money!!

and I promise this has nothing to do with Jerry Maguire

In most cases and as general concept, the more hits your website receives, the better your social media is performing. Here are some general ‘engagement’ metrics that you can monitor once visitors arrive:

• Unique visitors
• Page views per visitor
• Time spent on site
• Total time spent per user
• Frequency of visits
• Depth of visit
• Conversions

Most companies can use web analytics tools like Omniture or even Google Analytics which is a free tool. This applications and tools give you a brief overview as well as a detailed numbers. This all fine and dandy, but there is still a major factor that can not be measured-How much revenue is upheld via social media.

In business, CEO's and execs want to know if ever dollar that is put, turns a decent profit margin. This is also known as their return on their investment. That's the problem with social media measurements. You simply can't measure ROI this way. There are just so many intangibles. I brought up this concept a while ago, but let's get into it again.

Say someone is on your site and then tells a friend about it and that friend makes a purchase. How do you measure that? Don't forget the the salary that is handed to the employees that manage the site or involved within the social media realm. So that's already a sunk cost, and needs to be recovered via sales. There are so many intangibles that can be measured by any Google analytics tools.

Although there is no direct measurement with social media, there is still a large market audience to gain.