My head is spinning from all of these acronyms, but this report from Adobe’s research wing entitled “The Social Intelligence Report” provides a lot of good information about tracking the increased value of social media ad space (specifically for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest).

As the below graph shows, Facebook CTR (Click Through Rate) has increased by 275% over the past year.  This is an incredible improvement, essentially meaning that the same ad popping up on Facebook will now get over 3 times as many click throughs as it did at the same time in 2012.  This is clearly a favorable trend for Facebook as they look to improve their revenue generation model.  While this is an opportune time for Facebook to increase fees for what is now more valuable ad space, the CPC (Cost per click) has decreased sharply as well, running at 40% below the same period last year.

Apparently the ROI of ads run on Facebook is also on the rise, at 58% higher than the previous year.  At first I was puzzled by this information; I have read in so many other articles and papers how difficult it is to calculate ROI on Social Media spend, but Adobe seems pretty confident in their figures.  As I read further it became pretty obvious though, particularly when looking at the below chart.

This figure shows the growth in RPV (Revenue per visitor) of each of the three social media sites that were part of the study.  This seems like a brilliantly simple and effective way of measuring the success of a campaign involving the purchase of social media ad space.  While CPC’s, CTR’s, and CPM’s can give quality insights into ad effectiveness, nothing will tell you as much about the impact to the bottom line as the ability to measure revenue directly coming from these ads.  As the increase in RPV from these platforms continues to rise, it could become a necessity for marketing professionals to make social media ad space a regular part of their marketing mix.