For years, marketers were led to believe that measuring social media return on investment was not only possible, but also required. Directing customers to a website where they can make a purchase is something companies can easily track. If you spend $1,000 to promote a Facebook post and generate $1,500 in revenue from your ecommerce store from that post, you can easily calculate your ROI.
For quick-serve restaurants and fast-moving-consumer-goods brands, where transactions happen offline and digital advertising budgets are dwarfed by offline advertising and sponsorships, attributing spend on social media to sales is virtually impossible–no matter how much data you can access.
It?s perhaps this easy access to mountains of data that causes anxiety among marketers. There are so many data points available, surely there must be some way to attribute a like, share or click to a purchase–and if not directly attributable, at least a correlation. When tens of thousands of people like your content, marketers and data scientists push Excel sheets to their limits to find correlation amongst the numbers. I believe that many in marketing have been tricked to believe that access to more metrics means that a social media ROI formula can be found. For decades, the world?s biggest brands spent hundreds of millions of dollars advertising in the real world. They would be able to track uplift in revenue for each campaign, and although they knew that only 50 percent of their advertis...