May 5, 2016: A survey report recently released by Econsultancy and Oracle shows that despite growing interest in social media, marketers believe that paid search provides the best way to quantify ROI. 50 percent of marketers polled reported that they felt “good” about their ability to measure paid search ROI – only email came close, with 48 percent agreeing that they could measure email ROI with a high degree of confidence.
It’s no big surprise that paid search did so well. Google, Bing, and the other engines pride themselves on the quality of their reports, which let marketers easily scan how they’re doing on both a macro and micro level. And while click fraud is an issue with every digital channel, Google et al police their marketplaces with extreme diligence, making them relatively safe ways to buy clicks from actual humans with real purchasing intent. Other nettlesome issues – including viewability and ad blocking – are effectively absent from these marketplaces as well.
Unfortunately, measuring the ROI of other important digital tactics – including SEO, content marketing, and social media – is regarded with much less confidence. Only 18 percent of those polled have confidence in measuring SEO ROI; 17 percent do not feel good about measuring content marketing ROI, and 19 percent have confidence in assessing the ROI of social media. Measuring the contributions of these organic tactics is inherently more difficult, given that their value takes longer to materialize and the ability to attribute a lead or sale to a given action is much harder to trace than it is with paid search.
Despite the uncertainties associated with organic tactics, marketers appear willing to continue investing in them in the future. According to the study, 77 percent of marketers intend to increase investments in content marketing in the next 12 months.
The study’s findings are likely good news for Google, where most paid search dollars are spent, because it suggests that marketers budgets will continue to flow to the marketing channel where ROI attribution is strongest. At the same time, however, the professed inability to measure the ROI of organic channels –including social media – suggests that marketers may make the mistake of underinvesting in emerging channels such as Snapchat where their customers may be migrating to. It also suggests that marketers – and their agencies – need to do a better job in terms of constructing models that can demonstrate the effectiveness of organic digital channels – even if such models cannot approximate the kind of detailed ROI attribution that marketers like best.
The Econsultancy/Oracle study polled 500 client-side and agency marketers in the UK consisting of a mix of B2B and B2C firms in retail, financial services, professional services, media, and telecom. You can read a summary of findings (but not the complete report, which is paid-only) here:
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