A few months ago, I shared one of those ubiquitous eMarketer charts showing how marketing execs measure the effectiveness of social media. Today, I ran across a new chart showing the top metrics marketers are using for online engagement.

An article in the new Fast Company explains that there is typically little, if any, accountability demanded of social media. And it’s interesting, in terms of actual prospects coming to your site, that the top metric most marketers are using is click-throughs, which shows you the dependence of marketing pros on paid search. While we understand the utility (and handy reporting) of PPC, we’d like to see lead gen and ROI as equally important.

After all, when you’re paying for clicks, and reporting click-throughs without disclosing bounce rates and time on the site, there’s very little real accountability. Since traffic is a direct effect of site optimization, we’re very glad to see that in the #2 position…because marketing drives traffic, and search marketing does it at less expense than any other medium.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 at 11:22 am and is filed under metrics and measurement, paid search, search marketing, seo, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.