Officially released last week, Adobe Social allows businesses to track online campaigns for return on investment by incorporating data from social media posts, shares and links with statistics from traditional marketing tools such as mailing lists and internet advertisements.

Enabling small to medium sized businesses to see which marketing activities have generated sales, the pay-as-you go platform is the latest in Adobe's increasing portfolio of digital marketing products.

Translating likes into dollars

While many Australian brands have seen increases in their fan numbers and engagement rates on Facebook, the return on investment of these figures has been difficult to quantify.

Companies which undertake large-scale social media campaigns, such as Carlton Draught’s ‘Beer Chase’ video, may now able to more accurately measure the link between social and sales.

Adobe's VP of product marketing Aseem Chandra recently talked to Mashable about this issue.

“We see a lot of focus on vanity metrics like ‘likes’, shares and the number of followers, but how do you translate that back to the actual revenue the campaign will grow?”

Key performance indicators

Social enables marketers to link revenue to specific posts within social media campaigns and aims to show how much a particular connection, such as a single Twitter retweet, is worth in sales.

Consumer habits

While Adobe Social is primarily set up to share and track posts across multiple social media platforms, it also allows businesses to better understand the demographics of their fan base, unlocking data to see the channels a user passed through before deciding on a product.

Comparing consumer habits with purchasing decisions is seen by Adobe as an important aspect of understanding which social media activiites prompted the most spending.

To learn more about Adobe Social visit the product page here.

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