Travelocity says vanity metrics are no measure of your social efforts

Being ‘liked’, ‘friended’ and ‘retweeted’ may feel good but do not reflect return on investment. Ritesh Gupta reports

Knowing whether a referral came from social networking site, and converted as a result, is one of the puzzles that analytics teams are trying to solve today.

However, while it’s important to measure the journey of travellers from social networks to a brand site, Jonathan Isernhagen, director, marketing analysis, Travelocity warns that brands shouldn’t make the mistake of being caught up in ‘vanity’ metrics such as likes, friends, fans and retweets.

“Fundamentally, social is just another marketing channel, so it all comes back to algorithmic attribution,” he stresses.

As a result, marketers need to understand the ROI of all of channel investments, social and otherwise. “Only once this mission is accomplished, would I then focus on the so-called ‘vanity’ metrics which paint a useful picture of the surrounding context,” says Isernhagen.

Quantify the benefits

The reason people gravitate towards the vanity metrics first, is that you can’t get impression data from most social media placements at a visitor level. “So people either try to put a dollar value on ‘likes’ and ‘re-tweets’, or say their social media investments are ‘strategic’, which is finance-speak for ‘I don’t know how to quantify the benefit’,” explains Isernhagen.

There is also a need to look at what influences reach and engagement on a social platform. For instance, how does Facebook’s algorithm EdgeRank work? In simple terms, if a travel company’s Facebook business page doesn’t have the edge so to speak, then its content or posts will be viewed by fewer users. Take a look at this video from EyeforTravel for more insights on driving more meaningful relationships.  

Top tips

Getting insights from social analytics is hard work but here are some recommendations:

  • Evaluate traffic from various social sources. This means keeping tabs on how each social network is driving traffic in terms of the time spent on each visit, pages visited etc.
  • Spend time on each of the major social platforms to understand the levers social marketers can pull
  • Understand the limitations on tracking impressions and clicks that they generate
  • Know that second and third tier of social platforms may be able to support your business goals disproportionately to current traffic volumes. For example, YouTube may be the top platform for video sharing but that doesn’t mean Vimeo isn’t worth a look.
  • Figure out how data produced by social marketing efforts ends up in your enterprise data warehouse, or engage a vendor to work on that problem.
  • Keep tabs on conversion rates on things like the point of purchase or newsletter sign up.
  • Consider the popularity of content and pages that are being shared. Also, how social plug-ins are paving the way for sharing of content from a site.
  • Try Google Analytics, a dash-boarding tool that pulls impressions in from Doubleclick, Google’s digital advertising technology subsidiary. Note* According to Isernhagen, its algorithmic attribution is now available for non-premium customers.

True worth

In the early days, says Isernhagen, there was a lot of hype around social media and many companies spent millions on social placements but saw little return on a last-paid-click basis. In fact, some companies even discussed pulling back on social investments. But the combination of impressions-based attribution for Facebook ads, plus narrower targeting parameters, has made the social ROI story far more positive, according to Isernhagen. Today tools like Visual IQ, Adometry, Convertro and Upstream are all able to pull impression data from Facebook ads, which enables marketers “to communicate true ROI to the finance team”. 

Jonathan Isernhagen, director, marketing analysis, Travelocity will be speaking at the upcoming EyeforTravel's Online Marketing Strategies for Travel 2014 in Miami (June 2 -3).

Related Reads

comments powered by Disqus