Last week, Coremetrics, Omniture and WebTrends announced features that allow their respective users to measure certain aspects of Facebook.  My review of these announcements, so far, indicates a parallel product from these companies.

Omniture announced a partnership with Facebook that will allow customers to refine their Facebook ad campaigns. Utilizing their Search Tool “Search Center Plus”, Omniture customers will be able to compare Facebook ad campaign metrics alongside other media channels and increase their ad spend on the social network.

Coremetrics announced that they have been able to partner with Facebook to utilize their Impression Attribution tool,  which can record something as passive as an ad impression on the Facebook site and, utilizing cookies,  tie it back to the customer activity on your website.  As well the data is set against your other ad campaigns so that you can compare and contrast.

Finally Webtrends’ announced (technically Webtrends’ announcement was the week prior to the others) that they have a way to “scrape” data from Facebook, Twitter etc, using an API and can tie the data against other ad campaign data.

Sounds a little redundant doesn’t it?  That’s because for the most part it is the same thing.  The key here is that Facebook has finally opened itself up to these companies to allow the respective API code into their system.  My understanding is that this API has been working for Twitter measurement for some time now.  The ability to do the same type of tracking that you can tie into your main analytics program is a big step forward in Social Media measurement.

Its important that Facebook is allowing these partnerships.  It’s too bad that they didn’t make the announcement themselves.  Not that Web Analytics needs validation from social media (I’d say Web Analytics is more commonly accepted as a company need than social media in most businesses today, but that might not be the case tomorrow!)  It is important that all three companies have announced a product that will help with social media measurement and that the product is fairly similar.

I’m interested to know how analysts will use these tools to analyze their respective clients’ social media engagement.  These announcements show that social media tracking is an important piece of web analytics and should be an important piece of your social media campaign.  I’m glad that the big boys in the web analytics world are taking social media metrics seriously.  My only concern is that the analysis stops here.

Engagement is only once piece of social media measurement but it is a big piece and right now seems to be the most tangible aspect of SM tracking.

My hope is to follow up to this article with a side by side comparison of the Social Media dashboard / report for each vendor’s system.

Would love to hear from anyone utilizing any of these three companies’ social media tracking tools on what you like and don’t like about the tool.