Archive for the ‘Channel Attribution’ Category

Email and Social ROI: Improved Results and More of Them with Conversion Tracking

Friday, August 3rd, 2012

Over the last few days I have seen a number of articles cross the transom on the topic of conversions as a measure of ROI. Fast Company, for example, last week published one called “3 Steps to Measuring Your Company’s Social Media ROI” where the author cited Sales Conversions, Value of Increased Traffic and Depth of Engagement as the three different measures. All of these can be measured with Google Goals, which we have now integrated into Real Magnet’s analytics across email and social.

And just yesterday in CMO.com an infographic appeared with comparative conversion data across email, social and search (email was highest). To illustrate the relative ROI across channels, the info graphic presents data on average Add-to-Cart Rates, Conversion Rates and Page Views per Session across email, social and search. Like the three steps in the Fast Company article, these too can all be measured with Google Goals (which means you can see a running tally of these too, every time you fire up your Real Magnets analytics).

Here is one more: Forrester Analyst Robert Brosnan pointed out to Target Marketing that tracking and reporting email and social ROI not only results in more marketing resources added to the channel, but that it also makes customers happier:

While spending on display and search dwarfs email, mobile, and social, the return on investment (ROI) is flipped. And not only can marketers deliver much higher incremental revenue from shifting spend to this type of engagement media, they can also deliver on other corporate goals, such as improving customer experience and satisfaction.

Email marketers are quick to cite email’s ROI, but I think we could do a better job backing up our claims with hard data. The competition for marketing budgets continues to intensify and pointing out that email and social are inexpensive and have tremendous reach will ensure that they remain inexpensive (ie, marketers will not receive the resources they need to expand, enhance and improve these channels) while the reach becomes ever more tremendous (ie, management will expect ever improving results).

Instead, email marketers need to shift the conversation to measured ROI of these channels. Demonstrate that traffic from Twitter results in more visitors who view 6+ ad-filled pages on the site, that Facebook visitors are subscribing to your newsletters, or that 60% of your webinar registrations came from email and the result will be more resources thrown into these channels. Look at search marketing for an example. If you know that every $1 invested results in $3.50 in sales, you invest as many dollars as possible, right? We can now do the same thing with email and social, using ROI to propel these channels forward, instead of holding them back.

 

Posted in Channel Attribution, ROI | Comments Off

Using Google Goals for Conversion Tracking

Friday, June 8th, 2012

Very soon we will be launching Conversion Tracking with Google Goals, which allows you to integrate the Goals you set within Google Analytics into your Real Magnet application. This allows you to see which messages – across email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – are responsible for any of the conversions you track, and even roll up the revenue per message so you know exactly how much this email or that tweet is really worth.

Normally when we hear “conversion tracking” we think of e-commerce, conference registrations, subscriptions or other online sales. But Google Goals goes beyond sales and allows you to measure almost any other activity on your website. Which means that the Real Magnet integration with Google Goals allows you to attribute almost any activity on your website to the exact message that prompted it.

Here are a few of the visitor behaviors you can track back to the channel and message level through Conversion Tracking with Google Goals:

Completion of an Action: On many sites, every conversion (whether it is a subscription to your email list, a request for a product demo, a purchase or registration) is concluded with a “Thanks for doing that” page. Google Goals allows you to use the specific URL from that page to signify the completion of the action that preceded it. Every time someone hits that page, you know what action they just took. (And now you’ll know what email or Tweet started it all.)

Google also introduced what it calls Event tracking last year. An Event could be the download of a specific white paper, or watching a product demo video for at least two minutes. Event tracking is useful for those activities you want your website visitors to take, but which may not have a specific URL associated with completion.

Site Engagement: You can also use Google Goals to measure the number of people who meet certain engagement criteria, such as viewing 5 or more pages in a visit, or spending at least 3 minutes on the site. Engagement trends can provide a lot of insight into the quality of your visitors. For example, you may find through Social Magnet that your Facebook posts are bringing in twice as much traffic as LinkedIn, but that your visitors from LinkedIn are far more likely to spend a meaningful amount of time on the site. Conversion Tracking with Google Goals allows you to see where your quality – as well as your quantity – is coming from.

Content Consumption: If you are promoting a new product, you may be particularly interested in all the activity on the page that promotes it. Conversion Tracking with Google Goals lets you turn that product page (or any page on your site) into a Goal, so you can see which messages result in the most visits to it. Note that with Google Goals the visit to the page does not have to be the first thing your audience does. Someone could follow a link on Facebook to your homepage, see a house ad to your featured product and then reach the page that way – that conversion would be attributed to Facebook (as it should be).

You can also track a “conversion” to an entire product category. For example, you could set up a Google Goal to measure the number of times any of your visitors reach any page in your blog, or view any of the offerings in your “Services” category, or read any of the pages in your “Case Studies” section. The system is very flexible, which makes it extremely powerful. All you need to do is take about 3 minutes to set up each goal that is important to you to measure – all the way back to the messages that drive your most strategically important website activities.

If you do not yet have Google Analytics, now is a great time to create an account (it’s free). If you do have it set up already, here’s a tutorial for creating Google Goals so you can get the most out of Real Magnet’s Conversion Tracking with Google Goals when it launches.

Posted in Analytics, Channel Attribution, Email+Social | Comments Off

Signal-to-Noise Ratio, And The Rise Of Channel-Specific Content

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

For my article in MediaPost this week I picked up on a theme I spoke about at last week’s SIPA conference – Signal-to-Noise ratio. We know that all our communications channels rely on strong content, so it’s no wonder that when we create one we like to push it out through all of them. This is one of those practices that fails the “what if everyone does this?” test (which is important because everyone does, and there are more everyones every day). I foresee the rise of channel specific content in the very near future. Read the article to learn why, and what you can do to prepare.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio, And The Rise Of Channel-Specific Content
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 5-30-12

“We have to let everyone know about this.”

That phrase is common in marketing departments of all sizes, across all verticals, around the world. What “this” is could be a limited-time promotion, the opening of a conference’s registration, the receipt of a prestigious award — you name it. Whatever your brand, there is frequently something pertaining to it that is important enough to share with as many people as possible.

Up until recently, the common rejoinder to that phrase was, “OK, let’s send an email.” Today it is not so simple. Not only do most of us not enjoy 100% open rates consistently; we also do not limit ourselves to an audience in a single channel. So “Let’s send an email” has evolved into “Let’s send an email, put it up on Facebook, tweet it, post it to LinkedIn, pin it and put it on our blog.”

That’s a lot of messages, in a lot of channels. And since we inevitably have audience duplication across channels, it is also a lot of redundance. You can call it “increased frequency” if you like, but before too long your subscribers and fans and followers are going to start referring to it simply as noise.

Play it forward, and the rise of channel-specific content is inevitable. People may like a brand enough to follow it in multiple channels, but repeating the same messages everywhere will prompt your audience to choose one channel over the others, robbing your brand of incremental points of engagement. Today, channel-specific content is a sound marketing practice as it shows respect for the way your audience uses the inbox, Facebook, Twitter and other channels. Soon, however, channel-specific content designed to increase the signal-to-noise ratio will be the cost of doing business for any brand that wants all its channels to be as vibrant, engaged and responsive as possible.

Here are some steps for shifting your communications from pan-channel broadcasting to channel-specific content:

Describe each channel – to your audience and to yourself. When you invite your audience to subscribe, fan or follow, let them know exactly what kind of (unique) content they can expect in each channel. For example, you may use your email list for a weekly newsletter, Twitter for customer service, and Facebook for promotions. Promoting them as such is a form of targeting, as your audience is signing up for the specific content you are providing in each. It also helps build anticipation. This is an easy exercise if you already have some channel-specific content in place. But if all your descriptions look the same, it is a cue that you may be generating too much redundancy in your messaging and need to work on a content strategy that engages your audience in different ways.

Use your email analytics brain (and tools) on social channels to find the best-performing content. You already know how to use email analytics to measure the effectiveness of messages in the inbox. Now, the same sorts of tools are available to measure click-rate, conversion and other engagement metrics for social messages. Using them allows you to see not just how much each channel contributes to your marketing objectives, but also to identify which messages take advantage of each channel’s unique attributes to really shine. This level of intelligence is going to be vital very soon, as marketers will begin limiting messages to the channels in which they work best, in order to make sure that every message contributes meaningfully to its channel’s engagement.

Develop key metrics on channel engagement, not just message effectiveness. Much of the duplication we see across channels now is the result of optimizing at the message level; we try to squeeze as many clicks as possible out of each message by pushing it anywhere we have an audience. Instead, I believe marketers are going to need to focus on optimizing each channel instead of each message. Develop and track a set of key metrics for each message that measures how much engagement you are driving in aggregate across the channel. For example, you might track “Likes per Post” on Facebook, or “Mentions/RTs per Follower per Month” on Twitter. As with email, it is important to balance the near-term needs of your marketing objectives with the long-term health of your marketing programs. Reducing the signal-to-noise ratio and keeping a close eye on how engaged your audiences are across channels will ensure that you can count on each channel to move your business forward this quarter — as well as three years from now.

Posted in Channel Attribution, Content Strategy, Email+Social, Engagement, Published Articles | Comments Off

Conversion Reporting: Channel Attribution’s Last Mile

Friday, May 4th, 2012

Social Magnet’s principal value proposition is its ability to show marketers how much each channel – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or email – contributes to a campaigns results. It does this through a proprietary URL shortener that measures clicks and other engagement metrics at the message level. You send out a message through all of your channels and can see exactly how many clicks came from each place, which is some powerful direct response insight.

Not all clicks, however, are created equal. Sometimes however, you don’t want just a click – you want your visitor to take whatever action that click-through to your website precipitates. We have had an event registration module within Real Magnet for a long time, which many clients use for webinars, conferences, meetings and white paper downloads. Regardless of the application, it is essentially a shopping cart that collects purchase or registration data (and payment if necessary), and integrates fully with the rest of the Real Magnet application.

Wouldn’t it be cool, then, if Social Magnet didn’t just measure clicks, but also conversions? Well now it does. Our new Conversion Reporting allows you to see exactly how many webinar registrants or white paper downloads are attributed to each channel, and each message within each channel. Here’s what one of the reports looks like:

Click to enlarge.

Pictured here is an Overall Conversion Report, organized by channel. The data is for a single registration event (in this case, a white paper download campaign) and shows how many clicks and conversions are attributable to the messages within each channel that were used to promote the event.

I’ve been using the tool to promote our own white papers and webinars, and the level of insight gleaned pretty quickly can be eye-opening. Seeing which channel drives clicks can be very different from which channel drives conversions. For example, in the data above, Twitter is casting off a ton of clicks, but has only a 10% conversion rate. LinkedIn, by contrast, has a fraction of the clicks as Twitter, but at a 50% conversion rate is almost rivaling LinkedIn in total registrations.

Analytics should always drive action, so after seeing data like this a marketer may well conclude that LinkedIn is far more fertile ground for registrations, and put more energy into building an audience there or begin buying targeted ads.

I think the marketer’s job is not just to drive results, but also to understand why the results are being driven, in order to replicate success in the future. With so many digital channels at our disposal, channel attribution becomes critical, to make sure we focus our energy where it does the most good, squeezing all the productivity we can out of the resources we have available.

Posted in Analytics, Channel Attribution, Email+Social | Comments Off

Evaluating Email Through Return on Resources (ROR)

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

I spend half of my time thinking about email, and the other half thinking about social media. I probably spend a quarter of the time thinking about mobile as well, 30% on blogging, 20% on webinars and a good tenth of the time on other types of content marketing. Butmost of the time I’m focused exclusively on channel attribution and integration. It’s a wonder, then, that I was able to write a column for MediaPost at all, though no wonder that the topic I chose for this month was resource allocation. Dividing up the pie that is our time across all of the marketing channels we operate in is becoming increasingly complex. With email and social and other forms of content marketing, examining ROI is not enough, as the principal input is not money, but resources. So I propose that we use Return on Resources (ROR) to better measure each channel and ensure they get the attention they deserve.

Evaluating Email Through Return on Resources (ROR)
by Mike May
Published on 5-2-12 in MediaPost’s Email Insider

Return on investment (ROI) is the metric marketers most commonly use to compare ads, campaigns and even entire channels. ROI makes sense for evaluating marketing when the primary input is external spending: buying media, printing expense, postage, creative costs or sponsorship fees, for example.

Email, however, does not fit neatly into the same model. Sure, there is an expense associated with email, but the principal input into an email campaign — where your audience is earned over time and not bought (or rented) with a lump sum — is the amount of time and energy your company has devoted to it. Because the monetary “investment” denominator in email is comparatively low, using a strict ROI calculation will always allow it to shine. That’s fine with those of us in the email industry, as we always win the ROI contests. But it misrepresents what must actually be invested in email in order for it to perform: the internal resources that nurture and grow the program.

I’m sorry to be the one to blow the whistle on this ROI game email has been winning, but it’s high time we stopped looking at email in the context of ROI altogether. Now is the time to consider a return on resources metric. Am ROR measurement will better evaluate how relevant inputs affect results, which in turn can help ensure that email gets the resources it needs to perform at the highest level.

Here is why evaluating your email program through ROR can make your email program more effective and better understood:

Better absolute gauge of email’s return: Measuring marketing is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to anoint a winner, but to improve each channel. Email’s appeal is not its efficiency, which is what ROI measures. Rather, it is its effectiveness. ROR removes the emphasis from the direct expense and draws attention to what results email actually drives.

More accurate comparison to complementary channels: Email is not alone in benefiting from a ROR measurement. Social media, video, webinars, blogging and other forms of content marketing are similar to email in that the principal input is not money spent, but resources devoted. And in many organizations, the resources devoted to email are also involved in these other initiatives, so ROR helps organizations identify how much of the resource pie each should receive.

Renewed emphasis on the resources needed: I worked in the online advertising industry during its dark years. That industry had a very difficult time recovering once CPMs plummeted. Two things happened when the out-of-pocket expense (the “I” in ROI) for buying online media dropped: 1) ROI naturally increased, even when the actual return from lousy “Punch the Monkey!” ads was also dismal; and 2) Advertisers had a hard time justifying the need for better creative since the media expense was so low, and ROI appeared so high. As a result of the low expense and high ROI, advertisers took their eyes off the ball — not necessarily to have an impressive ROI, but to actually drive results from the channel.

I see the same thing happening in email, even today. Because it costs so little to send a few hundred thousand messages, many marketers do not put the necessary energy and resources into campaign planning, segmenting, content strategy or creative. Focusing on ROR reminds us that the real input in email is not what you pay your ESP, but the years you have spent gaining the permission to contact tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the first place.

Improved understanding of scale: Ultimately, marketing metrics of all kinds should drive some action. Analyze your search advertising, for example, and you may find that it has among the highest ROI of all your channels, and that increasing search spending is the best way of spending the extra 10% in your marketing budget next year.

Again, email is different. Only in the largest organizations can an increase of 10% actually be actionable. If the staff tending email and/or social channels is small (and it is commonly part of a single person, right?) any change to the “budget” simply translates into “you need to spend more time doing this.” Email suffers when email marketers are responsible for a lot more than email, so better evaluating the return on the time marketers put into email can help protect the channel’s claim to that time. Keeping the emphasis on the actual results is the only way to affect headcount (or reallocate other responsibilities) in a way to scale email aggressively, which will lift email’s results more than squeezing more blood from the stone in the cubicle by the kitchen.

Posted in Channel Attribution, Published Articles, ROI | Comments Off

Measuring Email’s Shifting ROI: From Performance Metrics to Quantitative Return

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

MarketingSherpa released an interesting piece of research this week from its Email Marketing Benchmark Report. According to a survey of 2,735 CMOs across a range of industries, the leading factor in helping to identify and communicate the value of an email program is its quantitative financial ROI (65%). The second most popular response was post-click metrics (62%) followed by performance metrics such as open and click rate (56%). The same question asked in last year’s survey saw post-click metrics (73%) and performance metrics (69%) at the top, with financial ROI trailing in next (57%). Here is the full chart of results:

Click to enlarge.

Why the shift from performance to financial ROI? According to MarketingSherpa, email’s relative maturity compared to social media is responsible. Now that CMOs are using both email and social, it is natural to expect more accountability from the email program they have been relying on for a decade, relative to the social channel they’re just getting off the ground. Whereas performance metrics used to be sufficient for identifying email’s value, MarketingSherpa says that CMOs now look at click and open rates as a measure of program health, but not value.

Benchmarking your own company against this research can be an alarming experience. Quantifying financial value from a marketing channel is exceedingly complex, and even post-click metrics attributable by channel often take resources beyond many organizations’ reach. As a result, what is perceived as “mission-critical” data in some marketing departments is categorized closer to “nice to have” for more thinly staffed marketing departments.

Don’t despair just yet. In research, context is king. When evaluating data like this, the nature of the question is important. Specifically MarketingSherpa asked, “As CMO or senior marketing executive in your organization, how important are the following factors in helping you determine and communicate the value of email marketing programs?” It is unclear how each responding CMO interpreted the question. Some may have read it as, “Which of these do you use?” though others might have gone with, “Which of these would you find the most valuable?” I suspect there were many of the latter perspectives in there. It seems unlikely that the usage of post-click and performance metrics – which decreased Year-over-Year in the survey, has decreased from a year ago, though certainly possible that their perceived importance relative to financial ROI has dipped. I read this chart more as a popularity contest than a catalog of existing best practices.

The key takeaway from the research, however, remains the same: the drive for increased accountability is on. Marketing budgets for email and social are on the rise, but after a few lean years in marketing departments it’s clear that no new spending will go unscrutinized. The scalability and low cost of email and social promise significant ROI, but more than ever CMOs are pressed to deliver on, measure and communicate ROI – promised or otherwise. And now more than ever, a measure of success for a marketing professional – at any level or functional responsibility – will be the ability to measure and communicate the value of marketing channels, in order to justify marketing spend.

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3 New Ways to Look at Channel Attribution with Social Magnet – Part 3: Clicks Per Person

Friday, March 9th, 2012

I’ve written about some new ways to measure channel attribution with Social Magnet a couple times previously, covering Monthly Reach and Monthly Productivity. This time, instead of measuring what you can attribute to each channel, I’m going to look at how to use Social Magnet to measure the relative direct response value of audience members within each channel. The metric I’m focusing on is Clicks per Person, or the number of clicks each audience member contributes to your direct response initiatives over a given time, in each channel.

The value of this information is that it allows you to determine the relative value of an email subscriber versus a Facebook Fan or a Twitter Follower (and soon a LinkedIn Group Member). You may have seen studies that say that a Facebook fan is worth $X or an email subscriber is worth $Y. That sort of industry wide data is useless, even directionally. Not only are the calculations based on inputs that may have no bearing on your own business, but the way organizations use their audiences in each channel varies so dramatically that benchmarking is rendered all but irrelevant. The only way to know the value of your own audience is to measure it yourself, which is what Social Magnet allows you to do.

Here’s how to do it:

Start with a Comparative Report like the one shown in Part 2, here. From this you’ll need the number of messages and clicks for each channel over a period of time. Start with a month – it’s long enough for you to work through a complete cycle of communications in each channel, but not so long that your audience size will vary dramatically enough to skew your results.

From here, you just need to divide the number of clicks per channel by the audience size in each channel. Social Magnet provides reporting on your audience size for many of its click-rate calculations, so that data is readily available. You’ll want an average audience size for the date range you’re looking at, which may be different from the size when at the end of the range. For example, if you started the month with 1000 Facebook Fans and ended with 1200, use 1100 as your audience size for calculations. If your social activity was weighted towards the end of the month when you had a larger audience, you can shift that number accordingly, to 1120 or 1150. (There is a Six Sigma accurate way to do the calculation but it requires taking the actual audience at the date of each message, and the number of clicks from each message. Social Magnet has this data, but the extra work isn’t normally justified as the changes to the data are insignificant.)

Here’s what it might look like in a spreadsheet:

In this example, we see that Email is generating .08 clicks per person per month. Facebook and LinkedIn are slightly higher, with Twitter followers clicking on average over 6 times more often per month as email subscribers. Look in the far left hand column for the explanation – frequency. Twitter allows for a much higher frequency than the marketer in this example is using for email. It doesn’t mean that email is not effective. Rather, if you’re sending a once-weekly newsletter like in this example, you have a significant opportunity to drive incremental engagement through social channels.

We see also in this example that Twitter is an especially productive channel, not just because of the added frequency, but also because the clicks per message are higher than the other social channels. We can deduce that this brand enjoys more success through Twitter than other channels, and the metrics here suggest that more Twitter followers would be more profitable to this brand than more Facebook fans. So audience development initiatives (sweepstakes, cross-promotion, contests, advertising) might pay off higher in Twitter than Facebook.

What would your data look like in this table? This marketer is seeing a 2% click-through on email. With a  3% click-through the Clicks/Person would jump to .12, rivaling Facebook. Increasing the email frequency also directly affects Clicks/Person.

Even though this only measures clicks, and not what happens once traffic from each of these channels reaches your website (which we’re working on, by the way), I think it’s enormously informative when it comes to resource allocation. Every channel does count, and moving the needle on any of the key metrics – frequency, click-rate or audience size – can have an immediate impact on results. Most of us don’t have the luxury of doing everything we possibly can in each channel, so analyses like this make resource allocation a little more strategic, and help drive more ROI from whatever time we have to invest.

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3 New Ways to Look at Channel Attribution with Social Magnet – Part 2: Monthly Productivity

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

Channel attribution – or determining which marketing channel is responsible for results – is rapidly becoming an indispensable tool for marketers. Gone are the days where we could spend whatever we wanted on our channels of choice; today’s marketer has to select channels carefully, and justify their inclusion in the budget with demonstrable ROI and accountability. “We’ve always done it this way and I know it works,” is giving way to “A dollar in this channel drives more results than a dollar over there, so I’m shifting budget.” Social Magnet was developed to facilitate decisions about budget and resource allocation, by showing marketers exactly how different channels are contributing towards marketing results.

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about how Social Magnet allows marketers to measure the Monthly Reach of their various channels. Reach is important, but by itself is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Does a tweet carry the same impact as an unread email spied in the inbox? Do status updates ultimately compel action? One way to get at the answers to these questions is through Social Magnet, where you can easily measure the number of clicks each of your channels generates – in total and by content categories you determine.

In the Reports tab, simply run a Comparative Report on Overall Statistics for any date range you like. Here’s what our past 30 days looks like:

Click to enlarge.

The report generates a table and charts that tell the story. Red is email – the chart on the left shows that there were far fewer email messages than Facebook or Twitter, while the right side pie chart reveals that that small number of messages was nevertheless responsible for a significant percentage of the clicks. The table at the top bears this out: the 6 email messages over the past month generated 635 clicks, or about 106 clicks per message.

The real story here though is the light blue on the pie charts, for Twitter. Because the channel allows for much higher frequency, the total number of messages is very large – 85 over the course of the month, or about 21 per business day. These tweets drove the lion’s share of clicks for the month as well: 1137 clicks, or over 60% of the monthly total.  That works out to 13 clicks per tweet, which by itself isn’t going to win anybody a promotion to CMO. But slow and steady wins the race here, and despite messages that drive only about 13% as many clicks as an email message, the cumulative impact over the month is sizable. Remarkable, even.

You can look at productivity (or total clicks per channel) over any time period, but I like Monthly because normalizing time for frequency is necessary. You need a long enough period for all of your channels to cycle through at least once. Longer is always better for that reason, but running monthly allows you to monitor trends month to month as well.

Social Magnet also allows you to run similar reports, but filtered to certain categories you choose. For example, we categorize messages into Webinar Promotions, Newsletters and others, so we can see which channels are more adept at certain content types. I’ll dig much deeper on category reporting another day.

Posted in Channel Attribution, Email+Social | Comments Off

3 New Ways to Look at Channel Attribution with Social Magnet – Part 1: Monthly Reach

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

The most powerful feature in the tracking and reporting features of Social Magnet is the ability to measure channel attribution in all new ways. At the very top level, you can send a message out through email, Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, and then see which channel drives the most clicks. Over time, you’ll learn which content types are best suited for each channel, but even before that learning takes place it’s immediately apparent how much each channel is contributing to the objectives of the message.

In addition to measuring attribution at the message level, Social Magnet allows marketers to measure monthly reach, monthly productivity and clicks per person. Today I’ll look at Monthly Reach, with subsequent posts focusing on the rest.

Monthly Reach

Reach isn’t a term normally associated with email, used instead in advertising to measure the number of people (at least theoretically) exposed to an ad. In online advertising, reach may be the number of times your ad is served (even if it’s served below the fold and the “viewer” never actually views it). In print, it could be the circulation of the magazine, though the assumption that every subscriber looks at every page is similarly flawed. What’s important about any metric though is that its errors are standardized. With email, we could say that the number of opens is equal to reach, though there are many of our subscribers who do read a message without registering as opens because they turn off images. On the social side, we have no idea how many people on Twitter see our tweets. Facebook does probably the best job with reach by actually counting the number of times a post appears on somebody’s news feed, or is viewed on a brand’s wall.

But the least common denominator across email, Facebook and Twitter is simply the size of the audience. If you have 10,000 email subscribers, your reach is 10,000. 500 Facebook fans and 500 Twitter followers makes your reach in those channels 500. None is completely accurate but at least their inaccuracies are shared. In this case, reach is the number of times your message may be seen by a member of your audience.

When comparing email to social, reach is most valuable when measured over a period of time. The reason is that most brands send social messages far more frequently than email, and measuring over time normalizes the channels against this frequency. I like to use a month, but you can choose any period that fully represents 1 or more cycles in your marketing. (eg If you send out a monthly newsletter, don’t calculate weekly reach only for the week you send it, as that discounts all the activity from your other channels when your email is inactive.)

Let’s create a fictitious scenario to demonstrate why normalizing reach across time is so important to channel attribution. Here’s what Company M’s marketing balance sheet looks like:

- Email: 10,000 subscribers, mail a 1x weekly newsletter (4.3x / month)
- Facebook: 500 fans, post 1x daily on weekdays only (21.5 / month)
- Twitter: 500 followers, tweet 4x daily on weekdays only (86 / month)

The email audience is significantly larger than social – 20 times as large, in fact. But because the messaging frequency is so much higher in social channels (a function of message ease, message length and market expectations), the monthly reach tells a very different story. To calculate, simply multiply the number of messages per month by the size of the audience, thusly:

- Email: 43,000 monthly reach
- Facebook: 10,750 monthly reach
- Twitter: 43,000 monthly reach

Even though Company M’s email list is 20x the size of its Twitter audience, it messages on Twitter 20x more frequently, making the monthly reach of each channel the same. Now there are nuances here, to be sure. For example, is a tweet as powerful a brand message as an email? And what about frequency? Email frequency is only 4.3 per month, while Twitter audiences are exposed to 86 messages per month. Which is ideal?

The answer, as usual, is “it depends.” And part of what it depends on is how well these numbers translate into response. That’s what I’ll look at next time – Monthly Productivity.

Posted in Channel Attribution, Email+Social | Comments Off