There have been some very good posts (which will show up as bookmarked in my Daily Links at some point today ) about the ROI of Social Media. It’s clearly time to focus on the contribution to the bottom line and not just the touchy-feely un-measurables.
I haven’t thought through the metrics with the exception of advertising. If we operate under the rules that Google has given us, we earn more money from Adsense advertising based on our PageRank and the popularity of our content.
PageRank is a moving target, subject to constant reevaluation, but typically it is affected by content relevance, page views, time on site, visit length, and pages visited. I set up a view in Google Analytics that breaks out all traffic for this humble blog versus traffic referred from social sites (ie. Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Delicious, etc.).
Screencap from Google Analytics for Akkam's Razor
I don’t think I have sufficient traffic to make a sweeping generalization, but if we agree that longer visits, a lower bounce rate, and a higher number of pages visited, returns a higher PageRank (and thus higher compensation from Google for Adsense clicks), then using social media as a promotion or distribution channel works.
Tags: AdSense, Google, pagerank, social media
