The Social Media Advertising Boom
There is a tremendous movement towards advertising and presence on social media platforms. More than 20% of US online advertising is now on social media. This is unsurprising, as advertising follows people — and billions of people are spending enormous amounts of time on social platforms every day.
The Challenge: Translating Spend into Conversions
The challenge is to translate advertising budgets and social media campaigns into conversions. Likes and followers are interesting because they can be counted, but the ROI is trickier to detect as a metric. Many of the metrics discussed on social media tracking platforms — brand engagement, conversation, sentiment, reach, participation — are a bridge between campaigns on social media and actual traffic to your site.
What Can Actually Be Counted?
- Referred traffic: How many visitors arrived from each social platform.
- Pageviews per visitor (P/Pv): A measure of traffic quality from different sources.
- Conversion rate by source: Which social channels drive the highest-converting visitors.
- Cost per acquisition: How much you spent on ads for each converting visitor.
- Return visitor rate: Whether social visitors come back after their first visit.
Our Approach
As a statistics company, we like counting things. Traditionally we count referred traffic and conversions from banners, search engines, and PPC campaigns. We use a metric called P/Pv (avg) — pageviews per visitor — which we use to discern the difference in traffic quality between different sources. A high P/Pv from a social source is a strong signal that those visitors are genuinely engaged.
Conclusion
Social media is obviously important, and it's equally important to approach it with measurable goals. If you are building a campaign, build in variables you can measure. Opentracker gives you the visitor-level data to connect your social spend directly to real business outcomes — not just vanity metrics.