What’s The ROI Of Posting To Pinterest? New Social Media Solution Ohtootay Tells You

Social media managers looking to prove their ROI of what they do, today have a new option for tracking social analytics, thanks to the official public launch of a service called Ohtootay. Crazy name aside, the solution lets companies track their efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and elsewhere. But one of its more unique features in this crowded space is something which allows businesses to track their posts all the way through to website conversions, even when the original post didn’t point directly to their e-commerce site.

Ohtootay was founded by Mark Otuteye, and yes – that’s where it got its name. Mark is a former Googler and the CEO of AES Connect, which has been in the consulting business since 2007. The company helped a number of major brands with their Facebook applications, including some notable examples which he can’t talk about on the record. A few AES clients have included Sephora, Coldwell Banker and Nickelodeon, however. It’s from his company’s experience in the social media space that the idea for Ohtootay got its start: it was built in response to what AES’s customer base needed.

One of the platform’s standout features is its competitor comparison tool. That is, it can track what your company’s performance looks like versus competitors on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even the iPhone App Store, Android app store (Google Play) and Facebook’s App Center. “In some senses, Ohtootay is compete.com for social media and mobile apps,” Mark explains. “And we believe that angels, VCs and social media managers that are armed with this kind of data will be way more effective decision makers than their peers who only navel-gaze at their own data in isolation,” he says.

Another key differentiator between Ohtootay’s solution and others is a feature that lets marketers track Pinterest pins all the way through to website conversions and associated sales. This works even when a client shares a pin that doesn’t point to their own e-commerce site, and it’s likely to be the biggest selling point for this platform. Mark explains that other social analytics companies do something called “last-click” attribution.

“That is, they can say ‘Pinterest caused this sale’ only when a sale happens immediately after you click a Pinterest pin that points to their own website. That’s OK for impulse buys that happen in one click, but it’s not good enough for enterprise sales in which customers do weeks of research (much of it on other sites) before making a purchase,” he says. “What if a customer clicks on your pin that points to a relevant infographic not on your own site, later Googles you, and then decides to buy? Other analytics software will mistakenly tell social media managers that ‘Google’ caused this sale even though the customer’s first contact was through content you curated on your Pinterest boards.”

This last-click bias is a problem that over-exaggerates Google’s importance, and under-reports the role social media played in generating that sale. It’s something marketers have been after for some time, but haven’t yet been able to do because of the way social media sites are structured. To make this work, Ohtootay generates custom URLs (a company can use their preferred URL shortener as well), and then uses cookies to track the user. When that user arrives on the company’s e-commerce site, custom code embedded there will tell Ohtootay when a conversion actually happens.

Ohtootay has been operating in private beta with about a dozen testers for the past three months, but is today available to all. There’s a 30-day free trial, and then a $399/month/user charge. Going forward, Mark says the next addition will be an option that lets marketers track their profitability by allowing them to add their social media budgets to the platform. That will show them not just the dollar amounts of sales, but what it took to get there.

San Francisco-based Ohtootay is currently a bootstrapped team of ten. Sign up is here.