• Advertising Age, Monday, April 13, 2009 11:45 AM

A few consumer packaged goods brands aim to prove that you can measure ROI with social media. These brands participated in a recent study with comScore, MySpace and Dunnhumbly that suggests that even minor spending on social networks by CPGs can result in offline sales.

Ad Age notes that CPGs can't detect small five and six figure outlays used on social media sites using current tools for measuring ROI. To overcome this, MySpace teamed with comScore, a Web measurement firm, and Dunnhumbly, which runs loyalty programs for supermarket retailers, and cross-referenced the 60,000 people who overlap both panels, creating a single database that provides a glimpse at how Web advertising affects online purchases. One of the first studies was for an unnamed personal-care brand that ran a $1 million campaign on MySpace last year. At first glance, the results actually weren't that great, Ad Age says: of 76.9 million people exposed to the campaign in four months, as estimated by ComScore, only 765,000, or fewer than 1%, visited an advertiser page on MySpace, though roughly half who did (358,000) visited the advertiser's website.

However, when you add offline sales to the mix, the numbers seem to pay off. According to Dunnhumbly, which compared purchases among shoppers not exposed to the campaign with those who were, the campaign produced $1.28 million in sales, or a 28% return on investment.

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