The inability to measure return on investment is the biggest problem facing social media advertising campaigns, according to marketing and advertising executives surveyed by an independent research
firm on behalf of The Creative Group. Out of some 500 marketing and advertising execs polled on social media, 40% said measuring or defining ROI was the biggest challenge for their agencies or
firms.
That makes measuring ROI by far the most frequently-cited issue in the survey. The next most-cited challenge, at 19%, was finding knowledgeable staff to execute social media tasks;
meanwhile 13% of marketing and ad execs surveyed said finding budget for social media was their biggest issue, and 10% said gaining executive support for social media initiatives was their main
challenge.
This is just the latest in a series of surveys showing that measuring ROI is the biggest issue holding back social media. In May I wrote about a survey of 329 brand executives by
PulsePoint Group and the Economist Intelligence Unit for eMarketer, in which half the survey respondents said lack of standardized metrics for ROI was a big impediment for social media campaigns.
And in March I wrote about a survey of 283 corporate marketing decision makers, conducted by Research Now, which found 39% said their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not
real-time enough. Meanwhile 51% said that a lack of sharing customer data within their own organization is a barrier to effectively measuring their marketing ROI. Thirty-seven percent of respondents
did not include any mention of financial outcomes when asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization, with 22% using brand awareness as their sole measure when
evaluating their marketing spending.