3 Ways to Measure Return on Investment for Marketing Channels

Graph from B2B Marketing.net

Wondering if you're along not properly estimating the return on investment for specific marketing channels?

Your company has lots of company when measuring ROI.

B2B Marketing.net reports only 6 percent of companies can effectively measure marketing returns "all the time."

The data was generated by B2B marketing in conjunction with Circle Research.

77 percent of companies could measure ROI on occasion.

Local ROI Tracking

I've experienced this on a micro-level in my career while writing content and radio spots for a nonprofit organization and while working with businesses east of Los Angeles in Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley.

Tracking results is helpful, of course, but marketing in different channels means there is a co-mingling or entanglement of outlets.

I wrote a series of online articles and new web copy for a property management company with rental units throughout the San Gabriel Valley. The staff carefully tracked where every renter came from.

There were 2 renters who said they came from online but not the company's main website and they couldn't identify the exact outlet.

It may likely have come from one of the articles I wrote or a re-written portion of the web site.

The good news was the revenue was new and it came about 5 weeks into my stint with the company.

Information Overlap

A reason this may occur is people are looking for information quickly, especially online. They may not care about the source and probably what happened is the renters found one of my online articles through a search engine result, skimmed the content, and clicked on the link to the property management company's main site.

This would have led them to choose a specific apartment building in a specific city. By the time they arrived the property manager asked the source they would only have been able to say, "online somewhere."

We used Google analytics to track website traffic and the number of search terms people were using to find the apartments jumped up dramatically after I began the content marketing effort.

Here are 3 different ways to measure marketing activity:

Evaluate referral sources

This is especially helpful with professional business consultants or companies using Yelp.

Evaluate website traffic

Use an analytics program to determine the geographic location, online referral sources, and keywords entered to reach the main website.

Evaluate coded specials

Coded specials can work great on postcards or direct mailers and the use of a dedicated phone line can help measure, too.

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