Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Omniture

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Mar 4, 2010

Web analytics company Omniture (news, site) bets that your brand has a Facebook application, and that you’d love to know how it’s performing.

Old News

Roughly nine months ago, Omniture and Facebook teamed up to create an application capable of measuring the analytics within our favorite social network. The app gave Omniture’s SiteCatalyst users the ability to measure the popularity and success of Facebook applications using analytics, segmentation, and reporting capabilities.

It was intriguing, it had a lot of promise, it was useful, blah blah. What happened to it?

Back in Action

Today Facebook is even larger than it was then. You know, being slated to bring in US$ 1 billion in revenue and all. Omniture—bigger in its own right thanks to Adobe which bought it last year for US$ 1.8 billion—is understandably attempting to re-ignite its involvement.

Accordingly, this week the pair has announced the expansion of their marketing partnership. New functionality includes the use of Omniture’s SearchCenter Plus product, which allows users to purchase Facebook Ads. In turn, Omniture customers will be able to compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels and increase their ad spend on the network using familiar tools.

Moreover, Omniture customers can generate reports specifically designed to understand ad effectiveness for Facebook Pages and applications.

…Old News All Around

Does this aim sound familiar to you? If you’ve been following analytics, it should. First of all, because it’s not a whole lot different from what was offered at the start of Omniture and Facebook’s partnership. Secondly, because Webtrends—another well known analytics provider—released their own analytics solution for Facebook not too long ago.

“The ability to have concrete measurement on investments within Facebook and compare them apples to apples with other digital channels is critical to marketers,” said Webtrends' vice president of Marketing, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff. “Our comprehensive approach to measuring Facebook, beyond just applications, allows marketers to understand the broader picture of how their Facebook investment is performing.”

The point? No, measuring Facebook stuff is nothing new, but it looks like this year it's going to become increasingly important. After you've picked your poison, come back and let us know how it is—and isn't—working out for you.