• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 10, 2012

What influences the conversion when a social click, comment or referral doesn't directly lead to a purchase?

Marketers continue to sort through the data and signals to weigh individual events along the purchase path, but in social media, it's too difficult to tell whether the same consumer following a link in a Twitter tweet to a YouTube video bought the shirt from the brand's Web site three days later. Convertro believes it solved the problem that will eventually enable social media marketing to become a viable strategy.

Typically in this scenario, the earned event, such as sharing through social media, doesn't gain the credit. Convertro, which has developed cross-attribution technology of offline and online channels to measure campaigns, just launched a platform to support paid, owned and earned media. 

Jeff Zwelling, Convertro's founder, said marketers have no way of measuring earned media on social sites. "The lack of information marketers use to make buying decisions is absurd," he said. "They spend crazy amounts of money -- and have no data driving their decisions."

Many times companies don't have the technology to drive the data or the people to run the technology. Zwelling predicts that marketers will buy all media similar to the way they purchase financial assets and mutual funds.

Advertisers are convinced that paid media on Facebook isn't effective, so marketers are spending time strategizing earned media campaigns on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest and others. None leads to a direct click from social content to the brand's site.

Through a URL generation feature, Convertro can track not only the share action, but all future revenue attributed to users who have clicked through via a shared link, Zwelling explains. "A person responds to TV on mobile, but doesn't buy anything," he says. "Three days later, he goes to work and then buys it. We can tell the brand the TV spot drove the sale and how much it made for them. We also can tell them to stop buying time on one network and begin buying it on another to make more money."

Using the platform are 1800flowers, eHarmony, and dozens more, Zwelling said.