Swix has enhanced its original application, Swix Analytics — a dashboard that tracks ad campaigns and subsequent user engagement across 20 social media communities — with a new product that tracks the returns those campaigns are delivering.
Swix Social Marketer, currently available in beta, is embedded in the original dashboard once a client signs up for the service.
Users of Swix Analytics were saying that even though it was great to be able to track the various campaigns from one dashboard, it would be even better to see the ROIs attached to the offers, Swix CEO Scott Lake told CRM Buyer. So Swix decided to address that need.
“Businesses realize there is power in social media, and so they start to dedicate some resources to it,” he noted. “But they quickly come to realize that there are too many metrics to track to determine what the value is to the company in these offers.”
Tracking by Landing Page
What Social Marketer does is take the URL of a particular campaign’s landing page and then track the response to it by clicks, conversion and sales.
“Offers,” in this case, is a loosely defined term. They can be anything from a document download to a signup form or an event registration — or, ideally, the purchase of a product.
It is this latter category, Swix Social Marketer is able to calculate the ROI by tracking exactly how much revenue was generated from the offer, as well as which social media properties were the sources of that revenue.
“We break down each transaction,” Lake said. “So, for example, a Facebook campaign might get a ton of clicks but only a small number of conversions. But a similar campaign on another social media platform might have fewer clicks, but a much larger conversion rate. In short, the goal is to give marketers quantitative data so they can make better offers.”
A Lot of Number Crunching
This is how the application works: When a consumer visits the landing page, the application captures the header information of what is being clicked and drops a cookie onto the viewer’s browser. Later, if that person makes a purchase, the application is able to grab the shopping cart amount with a bit of Javscript code, Lake explained.
From there, it is a simple matter of adding up all the sales that were attributed to a specific campaign, tallying up the total costs of the campaigns, and then determining the ROI.
Social Marketer is a Web-based application written in Jango, Lake said, which is well suited to the large computational number-crunching it must do.
The analytics portion tracks 20 different social networks. With each property associated with three or four metrics, that amounts to 70 or so metrics that the system must monitor and calculate.
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