Before today, I have been impressed with the efficiency and demographic targeting of Facebook’s advertising platform. The only frustration I was experiencing was not being able to track conversions within Facebook to have an instant view of my cost per acquisition.

Today, I found an email from Facebook in my inbox announcing that they added conversion tracking! This means we’ll be able to measure any actions visitors take on our site after clicking a Facebook ad.

Watch out Google! Not only is Facebook cheaper on a cpc basis… I have a feeling the traffic converts better as well.

Here is the announcement from Facebook:

Conversion tracking allows you to track the activity that happens on your website as a result of someone seeing or clicking on your Facebook Ad. In combination with ad statistics like impressions and clicks, conversion tracking will help you better understand the value of your Facebook Ad campaign, and more efficiently manage your ads. With conversion tracking, you have the ability to track registrations, sales, or anything else that makes sense to your business. Give it a try.

In this “Chart of the Week” from Marketing Sherpa, only 7% of companies are confident social media is producing a positive ROI. The article says 7% is “outstanding” because social media is still so new. I respectfully disagree.

Social media is not new. Anything in digital marketing that has been “the rave” for two years is no longer new. I save “new” for the types of projects we don’t know about yet that will change our lives in the new decade.

Instead, I think this might be a classic “measurability” problem. Like I always say, “If you can’t measure it, it’s probably zero.” So I thought I’d share some tips & tricks for measuring social media without enormous budgets or expensive software.

We’ll start with the simplest way that requires no effort (assuming you have Google Analytics installed on your site. If you don’t, tisk tisk. Go here.)

Google Analytics – Referral Sources

The easiest way to measure the success of your social media program is to use the data that is gathered for you automatically. Google Analytics (GA) is smart enough to know where traffic comes from so if someone clicks a link to your site on Facebook, GA logs that visitor as a link that came from the Facebook domain. GA calls this the “Source” of the traffic. Continue

Mike explains his view on the subject in this great post…

Ive been conducting some informal research over the past couple weeks, and Ive discovered that a frequency of approx 20 tweets per minute mentioning the same word is enough to create a top trending topic on Twitter.

As I was watching the trending topics this morning, at 7am EST, I saw the word “peace” suddenly pop up on Twitters list of top 10 trending topics. Using Twitters search I quickly counted up the number of results over the previous 5 minutes, and found 69 mentions, mostly in reference to today being The International Day of Peace.

Over the next 5 minutes, there were approximately 120 new mentions. Combined, those mentions averaged about 19 mentions per minute at the time when the word became a top 10 trending topic.

This confirms an earlier bit of research I did last Wednesday, when I looked at the number of mentions for “Baucus” when Senator Max Baucus proposed health care legislation became a trending topic. Using Trendistic to determine when the term got hot, I went back through Twitter search and counted the mentions. I found that a frequency of approx 20-25 mentions per minute was enough to make Baucus become a trending topic.

The other key variable in the trending topic equation is the duration of the frequency of mentions. Once you pass the necessary threshold of mentions per minute to become a trending topic, how long can you sustain that frequency? Its this length of time that determines the strength and staying power of a trending topic.

View rest of post via Mike Arauz: Trending Topics on Twitter: What does it take?.