This research is intended to provide marketing practitioners with an overview of web analytics to explore the issue of how to define and measure the effectiveness of social media through analyzing the various activities of current/potential consumers as well as provide a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of digital content marketing using social media. These analytics answer broad questions about which types of social media metrics are best at referring traffic, about conversations at the organization’s website, and about comparing different social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter in this study. These analytics employ time series analysis to specifically address activities in SNSs that effectively drive traffic to a website and accomplish business goals. This study is one of the first empirical investigations in the marketing communication field related to measuring social media’s effectiveness. The major goal of this study is to demonstrate the value of businesses’ efforts and to optimize their digital/social marketing strategy using web analytics.

This research examines the relationship between advertising expenditures and perceptions of popular brands by children and mothers in the United States. Findings how that magazine advertising has a positive and significant relationship with brand affinity scores to children and mothers while other advertising, such as electronic advertising and other print advertising, have negative or insignificant relationships with brand affinity scores. In addition, the correlation between exposure times through product/brand placement and brand affinity scores reveals a similar pattern. Product placement does not cause positive and significant relationships with brand affinity scores for either children or mothers.