On Thursday I’m speaking at Digital Content Monetization Europe on a topic that regularly dumbfounds marketers: social media monetisation. My research for the presentation took me down three possible benefits of social media when it comes to Return on Investment:
One of the most frustrating things I face on a daily basis is other marketing channels reporting back using BS metrics. Today I’d like to share a recent example of measuring ROI across all channels and levelling the playing field to determine the performance of the different channels.
In the example I am going to use the digital marketing budget is 30% of the overall marketing budget with
SEO getting less than 5% of the overall budget. We continually went back to the client with exceptional ROI numbers and areas where we can deliver increases but they constantly said that there was no room for budget expansion and no more time could be spent on the account.
We then were asked to sit in a broader marketing meeting I was amazed at the fluff and rubbish that was reported back from the offline marketing channel. Cost per response in my opinion is fluff and it takes 5 seconds on a spread sheet to return an ROI percentage. It won’t be 100% accurate but it’s far better than not measuring at all. They were also not reporting back on how the offline spend was affecting direct traffic or brand search traffic and we saw consistent declines in both. They just assumed that it happened and had a flippant attitude to it. From my perspective it was time to shake their ivory tower a little. (more…)
One of the major talking points that came out of the recent Manchester SEO mini conferences related to the subject of forecasting for SEO purposes. As Head of SEO for a number of high profile search organisations within the UK, forecasting has become part and parcel of my day to day role, both in terms of providing a commercial rationale for undertaking a SEO campaign for the client, but also a way of providing a rational framework to the SEO project, one that has the end goals of the client at its heart and takes into account their fundamental reach and response requirements from SEO.
The main issue with forecasting has and will for the foreseeable future be search data, in particular an accurate number of potential searchers within a particular sector, and even more so on particular keywords. Yes ,there are various tools on the market such as the Google Keyword Tool/SK Tool, Webmaster Tools, Raven or even old school tools such as Elite SEO however the fundamental issue remains in terms of data integrity and robustness particularly when one compares this to a real time environment. Further to this, many of us are lucky to have clients which have 100% coverage on 100% off their keywords, 100% of the time, and without such data, it is very difficult to provide absolutely on the money forecasts. (more…)
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