Short Answer:

Uh, no.

But that’s not what some folks will try and tell you.

See in this digital age, there are some who will tell you they can follow the digital tracks that people leave behind and trace every sale back to where it began.

It could be traced back to a Facebook post, Pinterest pin, Tweet, or email.

But as good as the tracking tools that are available, they are extremely incomplete.

Even though we can track some of the sales to a specific online item, we will never know the complete effectiveness of everything we are doing.

Let’s illustrate this with a couple of examples.

Example A is an event,.  For several years I worked for a radio station that sponsors a Bed Race. It is one of 100+ events during a 10 day festival.  The bed race was brought back after an absence of at least 15 years.  We promoted the event with our radio station on our web page, on our Facebook page, on the air, and in print media.  It was publicized with earned media coverage, (news stories), and plenty of word of mouth from the community.

That community word of mouth was via social media,  face to face conversations, phone calls, emails, etc.

The 1st year of the return of the bed race, the streets were lined with spectators and fans, some arriving 2 hours or more before the event so they would have a front row seat.

Now typically the term R.O.I. refers to Return On Investment and is measured in dollars. With the bed race we had sponsors that paid various costs in cash or services provided which was their investment.  Each had their own expectations of what kind of return was acceptable, since there was no direct exchange of money at this event.  As the sponsoring radio station, we wanted to attract a crowd, create a positive impression on our listeners and introduce ourselves to potential listeners.  With thousands in attendance, we were satisfied.

Dissecting the promotion, piece by piece to see what worked, and what didn’t add value was impossible, no matter how hard we might have wanted to.  We could simply not say with certainty that a particular post on Facebook, or announcement on the radio worked better, or produced a better R.O.I. than any of the other promotional pieces.  They worked together.

Example B is a business.  A client I worked with off and on for several years started on September 11, 2001.  An eventful day in our history for sure, but they recall that was the day they got their 1st two clients and were officially in business as an assisted living care provider. As they grew they tried radio ads, magazine ads, had a page on their corporate website, got involved in the community, grew with more and more clients, gained referrals and repeat business.  I helped them launch a radio program and all we knew for sure was that business was booming.  During the 5 years I worked with them they moved their offices 3 or 4 times to accommodate their growth.

Despite the fact that they do a fair amount of promotional activity and paid advertising, they cannot pinpoint their return on investment accurately either because there is always that word of mouth factor of others talking about them.

Another factor to consider is what I call timing and snowballing.

The first time you hear about a business, you may have little or no interest in spending money with them.  But from that first exposure to their name, your mind begins to store away that business as you continue to be exposed to that business.  It could be weeks, months, years before you have a need to spend money with that business, but it was the accumulated snowballing of exposure that created top of mind awareness so when the timing was right, you spent money with them.  The snowballing was due to their continued marketing efforts, the timing was your timing, not theirs.

Before the web world, there were many ways businesses would try and measure the R.O.I. of a particular form of marketing.  Couponing, special offers, say you heard this on WXKE, etc, but those were all flawed systems.

In the web world, we can count conversions from Facebook posts, Pinterest Pins, even Email opens, clicks and conversions to sales.  But this fails to measure the impossible to measure; the snowballing that lead to that sale.

Also interesting as I work in the social media world and examine the sales that are tracked via Google Analytics for the internet retailer I work for I see that the majority of our sales that can be tracked to Pinterest or Facebook are not immediate and/or not trackable to specific Pins or Posts from the past day or week.  While we continue to fine tune our tracking mechanics, the fact is there are more people sharing in the social media world content about us that they created than there are sharing content we created.

Our most repined Pinterest Pin is one that someone outside our company created and didn’t even exist on any of our own Pinterest Boards until recently.

Here’s a challenge for you.  Can you measure the R.O.I. of business cards, of a new parking lot, or your heating and cooling costs?

Like my answer at the beginning of this piece, no.

Does this mean there is no value? No.

Does this mean we should look at the big picture and ignore measuring the details? Not necessarily.

But what we need to do is understand there are immeasurable benefits to a lot of the marketing activity that we do and do not be too hasty in cutting back strictly based on a Return On Investment measurement.  Instead we need to use R.O.I. as one of several considerations for each of our marketing and business expenditures and understand the unmeasurable benefits too.