People may ‘like’ your product, but not enough to buy it

Marketeers in Pakistan do not realise the power of analysing people’s behaviour on social media sites.

KARACHI:

For some brands, the ‘like’ button on Facebook is not enough. A few months ago, a cat food company beckoned pet owners to ‘put a paw on the love button’ on their Facebook page. But at the social media seminar on Tuesday, Imtiaz Noor Muhammad, the head of a brand consultancy company called Effective Measure, analysed whether adoration for a product online actually translates into purchases.

It is easy to measure the impact of an advertisement in print or a telemarketing campaign. But in Pakistan, people are just waking up to the possibility that the impact of promoting a product on social networking sites can be measured the same way.

Muhammad said that though Google Analytics generates detailed statistics about visits to a website, it remains a highly underutilised service. He said that it could be used to understand the buying behaviour of visitors to a website. The vast majority of marketers, however, use Google Analytics to only track audience count. According to Muhammad, the software’s advanced features such as content improvement, split testing, and e-commerce tracking are almost never used.

His observation was confirmed by a representative from Institute of Business Administration who was sitting among the audience. He said that the institute only monitors the number of students who access the admissions page.

“A marketeer can get users feedback on what they like most on a website - from its colour scheme to the services offered,” said Muhammad, adding that customised reports could reveal the time people spent on a website after being directed there by a search engine. “With a few code snippets, you can enable your website for Google Analytics and find out how the visitors to your website behave.”

Another issue arrives with the social plug-ins such as the ‘like’ button on Facebook or Tweets. “How do we quantify the social plug-ins which let you see what your visitors have liked, commented on or shared on sites?” he asked. “The world is still fighting about the issue of what the value of one ‘like’ really is in relation to return on investment.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2012.