At Etail Boston last week I had the honor of chairing the Social Commerce track and moderating a panel on Measuring Social Campaigns. I was joined by Lynn Power Co-founder and CEO of Masami Haircare and Anh Vu-Lieberman Interim CEO of ModCloth. Measuring social campaign performance is of course a tricky topic, and many people think its somewhere between the dark arts and guesswork. 

To coincide with this panel, we also conducted a survey among retailers and brands about how they measure social campaign effectiveness. One of the key findings is that on average brands and retailers believe that they can only measure 44% of social revenues, with some as low as 5% illustrating just how little confidence many have in being able to measure social campaigns effectively. 

It’s hard for several reasons including the use of in-app browsers by social networks (which limit third party tracking), and changes from Google Analytics to GA4 (which mean that ~40% less social revenue can be measured). But the big one is that many social shoppers leave the in-app browser and head directly to the brand site, breaking all tracking and attribution. 

SimplicityDX research from earlier this year showed that social revenues are under-reported by 245% as many shoppers head directly to the brand site, or go back to the brand site at a later date to purchase. As a result a significant proportion of traffic attributed as ‘direct’ isn’t in fact direct, but heavily influenced by social.    

Shoppers do this for several reasons: 

• They know that clicking through from social is frequently a bad experience – our research shows that 86% of US online shoppers had recently had one or more bad experiences.  
• Trust on social is a huge issue with many copycat accounts and scams a daily hazard on social channels. 
• Most purchases happen over time, not in a single session, breaking click-through attribution, especially where an in-app browser was used in the first session. 

I put this to the panel and asked the two CEO’s how they measure performance given the difficulties involved. 

Anh Vu-Lieberman of ModCloth provided some fresh data and insight. According to Similarweb only 6.6% of ModCloth’s traffic comes from social, but as Anh explained, she had run a customer post-purchase survey that asked shoppers what had influenced their purchase. The survey showed that 52% of sales were coming from social, suggesting that the total traffic (including those that didn’t buy) is by far ModCloth’s largest ‘source’ of its traffic. 

For Modcloth at least, that social is having a disproportionate impact on sales, far beyond what your typical analytics package might be able to measure. 

Lynn Power of Masami Haircare reinforced this commenting that additional measurement was essential to prove incrementality. 

Fortunately we were able to record the session that’s to the team at Etail, and if you’re running campaigns on social and wondering how to measure effectiveness, its well worth a watch.