Measuring Profit & ROI Across Channels

Measuring ROI and performance of all marketing efforts is very important. A search marketer should be able to measure every dollar spent and every dollar made. Different teams – display marketing, PR, email marketing, SEO team, paid search, social media, etc – working in isolation on different marketing efforts can make measurement difficult. This information is vital in making any business decisions. It is important for any business to know how much money they are spending and the overall ROI.

Important things to always keep in mind:

1. Sales
2. Volume
3. Cost (Marketing spent and overhead cost)
4. ROI

Top 4 things a marketer should focus on:

1. Link the marketing effort to financials: always link marketing efforts to a financial objective. For marketing, finance is coming from somewhere. This step makes a marketer answerable. This will also ensure overspending and under spending issues.
2. Track Marketing: always know all the different marketing promotions running for a client and measure them separately. This strategy helps us figure out which marketing promotion works for a client. Budgeting is based on the results of each marketing effort. For example, if email marketing is not producing much ROI then distribute the budget of email between other marketing campaigns like paid search, linkbuilding etc. In the image below, analyze the ROI from each channel and distribute the spending to increase ROI.
3. Attribution Modeling: attribution modeling is an important metric to analyze. We often won’t be able to see the direct impact of individual promotions. For example, running a Facebook promotion might not bring in direct revenue but might have some impact on a user at some point in time. Using attribution modeling we will be able to give credit to all the media and marketing efforts which somehow helped in lead or revenue generation. If we don’t analyze this information, we might stop promotion of all marketing efforts where we don’t see direct revenue and lead generation.
4. Advanced Web Analytics: A lot of marketers still use the old analytics technology. Some of the tools are outdated and don’t have the capability to measure some of these important analytics. Use a cost effective analytics tool that has the capability to track these advanced metric and also help in attribution modeling. Some of the advanced analytics tools can also help in estimating clicks and visits based on season, historical data.

It is very important to measure all the marketing efforts and promotions separately and see which is driving ROI and adjust budget accordingly. Use advanced analytics software to know the attribution model and assign weight for all the assisted channels in driving ROI.

SES San Francisco 2011 Session: “Measuring Profit & ROI Across Channels” speaker:
Wes Nichols, CEO & Cofounder, MarketShare

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Contributed by: Justin Varghese, ROI Manager, Milestone Internet Marketing