House email, natural search engine optimization and paid search lead the way in that order when it comes to the best ROI options, according to the latest MarketingSherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Survey.
MarketingSherpa just released a sneak peek of its Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008 based on a survey of nearly 3,100 search marketers. The ROI shows that house email is the strongest ROI tactic (25%) followed by SEO (18%) and PPC (16%).
Yet, it’s the other end of data that that’s astounding. Marketers (21%) find SEO problematic because it’s “hard to gauge” the ROI. You might expect that with public relations (30%) and print advertising (29%), but SEO?
You mean 1 out of every 5 marketers can’t find value in SEO?
With all of the analaytics available, you can’t tell what words drove what traffic to what pages?
OK, maybe e-commerce systems are a little more fun – plenty of extra data loaded for you. But jeepers, it’s not that difficult to figure out that a page is getting conversions. At least look at search traffic trends in general.
Maybe it’s just that marketers don’t know how to pick out the right keywords (they shoot for the moon). Or, they’re deficient in optimization tactics and SEO takes the fall for their failure to do a good job in the first place.
It’s the basics, everyone.
- Define target markets.
- Know your website viability - do you deserve the keywords you’ve thoroughly researched and debated?
- Understand ranking analysis and optimization techniques.
By all means, spend some time with web analytics. Please don’t blame it on the IT department. You do have some credibility after all of these years, right?
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I work on an ecommerce site 4 days out of the week and have increased traffic and sales 100% over the last year.
My boss told me he wanted 7 figures in sales a year after I started. I thought he was joking, but he had more faith than I did.
Ecommerce to me is easier, especially after you start getting hits. You definitely need good software to track things.