Eric Boggs from Argyle Social came in and spoke with us the other day about the importance of tracking where exactly your traffic comes from, especially with regards to Facebook and social media.
Whenever you see a ? followed by a string of numbers and letters after a URL, that is a tracking code in order to tell the website you are visiting where you are coming from so that the website can correctly monitor its traffic. If you click on a link after a search result from Google or Bing, this string of characters does not appear; the website doesn't know the difference between that and you just typing the URL into your browser and visiting that website directly.
The problem is particularly evident when using Facebook. When you click on a link from Facebook, those tracking characters disappear. To the website you are visiting, it can tell that you are from Facebook, but it can't tell exactly how you got there from Facebook. You might have clicked on a link on a friend's wall, or one of the posts from your brand's news feed. Obviously, these are very different leads that should be treated differently, and without this information, you are unable to differentiate between the two. There are several problems with this.
One, this offers no way to tell which of your social media campaigns are being productive and driving the most traffic to your website. This is a huge issue from a marketer's perspective, as those sorts of people generally like to know which expenditures are generating the most return on their investment. If traffic from Facebook is all just viewed as "Facebook" and not broken down into individual posts, contests, or status updates, then it becomes very difficult to monitor the ROI of specific activities or campaigns. This makes it almost impossible to optimize one's Facebook promotional activities.
This problem grows even more complex when one views it from the vantage point of a mobile device (specifically, a mobile device using a Facebook app, not visiting m.facebook.com from a cell phone). If one clicks on a link from a Facebook app, that website has no idea where you came from. You are an "unattributed user," and there is no difference between that visit and just typing the website URL into your browser directly. Considering that the percentage of social media consumed over a mobile device is already substantial and predicted to grow drastically, this is a significant issue.
Argyle Social comes into the picture as a developer of software that allows firms to track exactly which posts (and authors) generate the most traffic. This is incredibly helpful information, and marketers who try to measure ROI without capabilities similar to the ones provided by Argyle are kidding themselves.
On a more sinister note, the availability of this software coupled with the general newness of the social media industry provides for a moral hazard. Marketers have an incentive to not use tracking software such as this, because once they do they have to start being responsible and accountable for the traffic that they generate. If they don't use the software, they can simply point to friend counts and follower numbers--look at how popular we are! But, of course, this isn't a measure of ROI. At the end of the day, marketing is about selling something. As I read somewhere, "if you just want to talk to somebody, become a secretary".
Not that talking isn't important--I've devoted the past two days to talking about talking to people--but what is your end goal? As a company, it is to increase your bottom line. The way in which one goes about doing that is drastically different than it has ever been before, but let's not lose sight of that goal.
For a more in-depth (and no doubt more intelligent) review of Argyle's software, please refer to Jay Dolan's work over at Anti-Social Media, which is a great and hysterical blog in its own right, even if I am the sort of person and blogger that Mr. Dolan hates.
--Taylor
and then i woke up
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