by Phil Golobish
With over 400 million active users, 50% of which log on each day, Facebook’s community is clearly a place where marketers want to be visible. Given this, clients are frequently asking us how they can include Facebook in their online marketing strategies. However, since Slingshot SEO believes it’s absolutely necessary to track the actual ROI on campaigns, and Facebook’s “Insights” are somewhat lacking, there hasn’t always been a good way to track the success of Facebook marketing campaigns
Luckily, this past month, three web analytics firms, CoreMetrics, Omniture, and Webtrends announced more of their plans to help businesses track the success of their marketing efforts on Facebook. Of the big three, the Webtrends implementation appears to be the most robust for tracking interactions as they happen within Facebook.
The detail that separates the Webtrends solution from that of CoreMetrics and Omniture lies in the necessity of tracking interactions as they happen within Facebook, not just crediting traffic from Facebook to a company’s web site. In order to track these interactions internal to Facebook, Webtrends has developed a piece of tracking code that works inside a custom Facebook landing tab. In short, companies can now set up custom, default Facebook tabs that have the ability to track behavior with their Facebook analytics application.
Even though Facebook is still implementing their “Allow Access” screens to safeguard users from the malicious advertiser, analytics solutions are being developed to figure out what marketing works. Compared to CoreMetrics and Omniture, at this time, the Webtrends solution does the most to account for the tracking of behavior as it occurs inside Facebook. Facebook analytics can also be used in concert with Webtrends landing page optimization products, such as Webtrends Optimize.