e-commerce & social media

Consider a survey from eMarketer earlier this year that claims that over three-quarters of European marketers are using website visits as their primary measure of branded content effectiveness, yet less than half are measuring ROI (whether that be brand return or actual sales return, presumably). Visits are important, of course they are: Every brand manager wants people to actually see their content, right?

But to use a simple behavioral measure as a metric of impact on your brand is arguably doing more injustice to the rich immersive nature of branded content (when it’s done well!) than clicks do to display ads.

So why do we do this then?

Simple: Because it's often too hard to do anything else.

The measurement of branded content shouldn’t even stop at measuring brand impact. Quality of content is the very measure by which our readers judge us, and media owners need to acknowledge that what they produce has an impact on both their own and their commercial partners' brands… and this impact needs to be measured, too.

So what might a simple hierarchy of branded content metrics look like if you want to measure impact in its entirety then....

Via Jeff Domansky