23 Musings

Marketing Sherpa has quizzed 420 top digital marketing experts about what they feel are the most effective methods for advertising online and which give the best ROI.

Search engine optimisation came top, this is not surprising as the ROI is incredible. Some changes take such little effort and can return such amazing gains that SEO will always be the top in a survey like this.

Second came behavioural targeting for adverts, slightly more surprising this one as I wasn't aware the technology was quite there yet to get a better ROI than other ways of advertising such as paid search.

Paid search (or PPC) showed quite a drop in confidence in delivering ROI, however marketers said that the biggest increase in budgets would be in the paid search arena.

And the biggest trend in measurement for this year was voted to be the integration of search and email analytics with your standard onsite analytics thus completing the tracking of the customer journey. Integrating offline and online campaign tracking came second here, now that's a holy grail and I don't believe will be truly possible for a year or so longer.

Interesting study; more available here.

Gigaom mentions an experiment by Google into behavioural targeting for it's Adwords product. It's an attempt to increase the relevance and offer a more tactical solution to existing customers.

I'm looking forwards to seeing the next installment as this would be a hugely powerful tool for us. We're big users of Adwords and anything we can do to increase relevance for our customers will be massively helpful in increasing our ROI.