Social media has very little direct impact on most website traffic, according to new research released earlier from ForeSee Results. Less than 1% of website visits, on average, come directly from a social media URL. This finding suggests that the direct impact of social media is minimal, but also that the true value of social media cannot be quantified only by examining the traffic coming directly from a social media URL.
While only 1% of site visitors come from a social media URL, 18% of site visitors report being influenced by social media to visit a website. These numbers represent benchmark averages; individual companies show a wide range of direct and indirect influence.
“What this tells us is that traditional clickstream metrics don’t give us a full picture of what value social media efforts are bringing to our business,” said Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee Results. “Companies have long been able to count how many Facebook fans, how many Tweets, and how many people click through ads on social sites, but they haven’t had a way to calculate a tangible return on investment for social media efforts, not to mention other marketing initiatives. Now they can.”
By linking which visitors were influenced by social media with how much those visitors spent, companies are able to quantify the direct impact of their social media marketing efforts on revenue and goes far beyond traditional social media metrics such as referring URLs or raw counts of tweets and Facebook fans.
“The benchmark gives our clients a way to see whether their visitors are more or less influenced by social media than the average, which can provide a fresh perspective on directing social media investments,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.
The Social Media Value Benchmark also shows that people who are influenced by social media have a higher average order size, have higher customer satisfaction, and have higher loyalty than those who aren’t influenced by social media.
The Social Media Value Benchmark includes nearly 300,000 completed consumer surveys on more than 180 websites across a dozen private and public sector industries, including websites for Department of Defense, Drugstore.com, General Mills, ESPN, Express, Kellogg’s, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Ticketmaster, Sears, and Suntrust, among others.
“Countless organizations are working diligently to understand the effects of their social media activities, but most take a myopic view of their social efforts at the campaign or channel level,” said John Lovett, senior partner at Web Analytics Demystified, a leading international web analytics consulting and strategy firm. “Organizations that assess and calculate the value of social media marketing in the context of their entire business objectives while comparing those results against a benchmark of peers will gain a much stronger perspective on performance and return on social media initiatives.”
Read more about the Social Media Value Calculation on ForeSee Results’ website athttp://www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/how-to-calculate-roi-on-social-media-marketing.shtml
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