A free white paper, from CMO.com, describes how companies struggle to quantify the value of different social media channels:
The assumption that the marketing channel most responsible for a consumer’s behavior is the channel that the consumer last touched before a visit or purchase is called last-click attribution. Last-click attribution became widely used in the early days of e-commerce. It works particularly well for search, email, and other direct-response media channels because it measures the behavior of customers who are further along the engagement or purchase process. And it is still the attribution model most extensively used by marketers to measure all types of digital media.
But the digital paths consumers take are rarely this straightforward. To illustrate, suppose the consumer in the above example first noticed that a friend “liked” a retail brand’s Facebook post containing a link for a discount offer on shoes. The consumer clicked the link, visited the retail site, and explored the offer before leaving the site. Then, a few days later, the consumer searched for the site on Bing, saw the paid ad, and purchased the shoes.
In this revised example, should the marketer attribute credit for two visits and a purchase to Facebook or to Bing? The Facebook post appears to have driven the initial visit. But without the Bing ad, the consumer might not have returned to make a purchase. To accommodate this more complex scenario, some marketers use first-click attribution. Using first-click attribution, Facebook would get credit for the purchase because it drove the first visit, whereas Bing would receive credit with last-click attribution.
If the consumer’s path to purchase was even longer and involved more channels—as it often does—accurately attributing credit to each site along the path becomes very challenging. Marketers are developing sophisticated cross-channel attribution models in an attempt to address this complexity. However, in the absence of these models, first-click attribution can be a relatively easy way to more accurately measure the impact that top-of-funnel marketing communications have on website behavior.
To create the report, Adobe Digital Index interviewed social media analytics experts and analyzed 1.7 billion visits to the websites of over 225 U.S. companies in the media, retail, and travel industries.
The CMO.com article includes a link to the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2012 which has more content.
http://www.cmo.com/social-media/why-marketers-aren-t-giving-social-credit-it-deserves
http://www.cmo.com/AdobeDigitalMarketingSummit2012
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