Socialbakers launches paid analyticsSocial media management platform, Socialbakers, has added paid analytics. The new addition comes as organisations seek to increase their marketing spend on social media ads. The challenge for many is understanding how effective their ad campaigns are. Many lack the right metrics or insight into the different social media channels they use. For those relying on the built-in metrics from those platforms, the results are often less than useful.

Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO, Socialbakers
Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO, Socialbakers

According to Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO, Socialbakers: “Lack of clarity, transparency, and no oversight of budget allocation across channels or results are currently costing marketers their budgets.

“Digital spending will continue to skyrocket, while the marketing teams that are unable to properly manage their spend will see their costs rise and results diminish. It’s a critical time, and we’re committed to helping brands overcome this difficult challenge.”

Better metrics to understand the impact of marketing spend

The goal is simple: Provide CMOs and VPs with effective insight into what they are getting for their spend on social media marketing. This is more than just closing the loop on a single marketing channel. The perception of many marketing teams is that social media outperforms traditional marketing.

Unfortunately, few can evidence that. While they have effective systems in place for traditional marketing, they have little when it come to social media. Even where they do have some metrics, they are not easily compared to other metrics.

At the heart of this is a new dashboard. This is not just intended to be a complex single screen with excess data but something that can be customised by users. Each user can then drill down to get greater visibility into different metrics. For the CMO or VP of Sales, this gives visibility of campaigns at a macro level. For other members of the marketing and sales teams, they can drill into different channels and campaigns.

The latter is more than just a surfacing of data through analytics. Socialbakers is using its AI technology to assess the effectiveness of each channel. It also enables the use of additional approaches such as sentiment analysis. Using these, marketing teams can change the mix of advertising to amplify positive results and reduce the impact of negative ones.

This also allows sales and marketing teams to understand the ROI of a campaign by sales sector. This means that they can use different social ads for different regions to maximise effectiveness.

What is not clear is how fast Socialbakers can deliver that information. The website implies that this could be near real-time. If so, that allows for very fast and adaptive campaigns that can take advantage of any external factors as they occur.

Better management of budgets and outside agencies

Companies are increasingly using external agencies to manage their push into the digital and social market space. IBM, for example, does no direct marketing spend through their in-house PR teams. Instead, everything is done by external agencies. With Socialbakers, the internal teams are able to see the effectiveness of campaigns. This means that they can immediately ask agencies what is going on and what is being done to fix it.

This is a level of reporting that very large companies struggle with. Socialbakers is also delivering new reporting capabilities. It is using automation to gather the data and then enabling users to customise reports. The latter is not new but Socialbakers claims that its reports can be configured to be presentation ready.

Enterprise Times: What does this mean?

While spending on print marketing is still falling away, it is more than compensated by digital spend. However, digital marketing spend has been difficult to track in terms of ROI and effectiveness. There is also concern that the level of fraud in digital marketing is persistent and hard to eliminate. As spending moves to social media channels, companies want to have better control and visibility.

This is where the problem lies. Pulling all that data together across so many platforms is difficult and can be expensive. There are few analytics solutions that provide a coherent wide view of the social media space. Socialbakers believes that it has the secret sauce to fix that.

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