The question is: how many of these ad dollars will flow to social media? Andy Beal explains:

Sixty-two percent of U.S. online buyers use social networking sites like [...]]]> Forrester Research has just published a report which shows moribund growth in affiliate marketing budgets for 2009, followed by an aggressive compound annual growth rate of 16%:

The question is: how many of these ad dollars will flow to social media? Andy Beal explains:

Sixty-two percent of U.S. online buyers use social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace.com for communicating and keeping up with friends. Only 2% of U.S. online buyers have purchased products through social networking sites. Affiliate sites get paid based on transactions they drive, not simply click-throughs. Thus, affiliate sites currently experimenting with social networks may be getting traffic from these sites, but they are sending very few qualified leads to marketers. Little money will therefore change hands in this scenario.

There’s that word again: experimental. It began as a term of admiration, as in: “Cool– we can allocate some of our ad budget to experimental, up-and-coming sites like Facebook and MySpace.” Over time, however, the term has taken on a less enthusiastic connotation, as in: “Our ad budget is down as it is– you really want to invest some of it in experimental areas like social media?”

I think the cancer at the heart of the rose here is social marketing’s inability to affix ROI metrics to advertising campaigns. A recent report shows that only 16% of companies that use social marketing even bother tracking ROI. (Read another way, a full 84% of companies using social marketing do so in the blind.)

Until we can create a common dashboard of meaningful metrics to measure success, social media will continue to be plagued with the “experimental” moniker.

via Marketers: Don’t Count on Facebook — Seeking Alpha.