Well, this unsolicited letter from Omniture (now part of Adobe) had me scratching my head since our company specializes in driving Facebook traffic. Do a Google search on Facebook advertising and see where we rank. Also, we have 4,920 fans on Facebook vs Omniture’s 3,410.
What is presumptuous about saying where our traffic comes from is that it’s not possible for Omniture to measure our ad traffic or traffic from various Facebook pages that we have a voice. The old world of web analytics assumed you owned the audience– they hung out on your website. But in modern times, that audience may choose to interact on Facebook with your brand or between friends and perhaps not even set foot on your website. They could be on their phones, in a coffee shop talking, watching TV together, or doing other word-of-mouth things that a pixel cannot capture.
Thus, even if Omniture could magically peek into our Google Analytics (and to which they’d see that 3-10% of our traffic is from Facebook), it would still be missing the picture. In the world of PPC, there are keyword research tools where you can estimate how much someone is spending on PPC and break it down by keyword. On Facebook, that’s just not possible because of the targeting options. I could run ads targeting boys 13-17 who like to play football in the US– and unless you fit those criteria exactly, you just won’t ever see my ads. So to pretend to know how much traffic we get on Facebook is somewhat silly, don’t you think?
Are you also mistakenly assuming that it’s a good thing to rip users away from Facebook and into your website?
Because of Facebook’s graph API, it’s now possible to measure your traffic in a user’s news feed (home page), where they spend about 50% of their time. That’s right, most of those likes and comments that may appear as if they are occurring on your Facebook page are actually happening in the news feed. And though you can pixel a custom tab on your page, you cannot tag your wall, nor can you tag the news feed, which is an order of magnitude larger in traffic than what you can track via only the old way of doing things.
How much of your conversation are you missing by not listening in the right places?
P.S.– Sorry, Omniture. No hard feelings. I get a ton of unsolicited sales letters such as this one, so I randomly picked one to showcase. If you’d like to write a counter-response on how to properly measure the value of a fan, even if they don’t always come to the website (which is what your white paper insists that clients do), I’ll happily post it.
