Digital Marketing ROI

Many clients ask for advice about how much of their digital-marketing budgets they should invest in each of the various media channels, including email marketing, pay per click (PPC) advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), website improvements, social media, and radio and television. In other words, they want to know which channels provide the best return on investment (ROI).

As it set out to plan a marketing strategy and budget for 2014, an important first step is to calculate the ROI for each of the marketing channels it currently uses. Here are some quick tips for measuring ROI of the following key digital-marketing channels:
Email marketing – This is the area we at FulcrumTech spend much of it waking moments working on. And it’ll quickly realize how unbelievably measurable email marketing is in terms of ROI. It can measure the value of a list-building efforts and, ultimately, the value of the conversions it drive from an emails – from opens to clicks to landing-page conversions. If it really want to measure and play “what if” scenarios with an email-marketing ROI,
PPC advertising – PPC is so incredibly grounded in data that can measure just about every aspect of it to determine exactly what it’ll getting as a return. Some important ways to measure ROI for a PPC marketing efforts include:

  • Using dedicated landing pages for ads.

  • Using call tracking on those PPC ad pages and making sure analytics are solid. As a result, it’ll know exactly what it paying for the traffic, how much is converting, and what level of revenue is coming in.

  • Calculate cost of acquiring leads, as well as the ROI from each of those leads.
SEO – Calculating the ROI for organization’s SEO compared to email marketing or PPC may not be easy, but it can begin by measuring historic website traffic, historic conversion, and historic revenue levels as a baseline.it also should determine the most critical key performance indicators (KPIs) for organization’s digital-marketing efforts. For example, these could include sales, revenue, and/or newsletter signups.
With a web analytics tool (e.g., Google Analytics), it can easily set up goals to track exactly how many people are coming in from organic SEO and ultimately converting.
Social-media marketing – Measuring the ROI for social-media marketing can be a lot more challenging since its results involve such intangibles as engagement, audience reach, and “buzz.” There are ways to track social-media success, however, including such measures as the number of fans, followers, page likes, retweets, repins, web mentions, and sales levels. The following are also some free tools that are available to help measure social-media ROI: Website improvements – This involves optimizing a website by determining which combinations of design and content drive the most conversions. Typically, improvements to a website are highly measureable investments. Some important measurements to help evaluate ROI for website improvements include:

  • Number of website visitors

  • Click-through rates from dedicated landing pages

  • Conversion rates, such as online shopping cart sales, newsletter signups, completed surveys, white paper downloads, etc.

  • Increase in website-generated revenue.
Radio and television – If it thinks these can’t be measured, think again. With today’s call-tracking technologies coupled with unique URLs, redirects, and web analytics, it has many of the tools to evaluate the value from these channels, as well.