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SEM Study: Too Little ROI Tracking in Employee Evaluation
September 07, 2005
iProspect and JupiterResearch just announced the iProspect Search Marketer Performance Study.
The gist of the report is that too many companies (about 60%) use the same short-sighted metrics to evaluate the people in charge of their SEM campaigns that they use to evaluate the campaigns themselves - typically rankings and traffic, as opposed to genuine ROI/conversion tracking. The study finds, however, that as SEM budgets increase (it uses $1M as a fence), the likelihood of using ROI to evaluate marketers does increase.
It's good information and I strongly recommend a look. I do, however, take slight issue with how some of the data is presented. The study was based on responses to the following question:
Which of the following natural or paid search marketing metrics are taken into account when your company is evaluating your job performance?
In addition to the option of selecting "ROI from search marketing" as a choice, many of the other choices seem to represent potential subsets of ROI tracking, such as "Return on advertising spend," "Number of leads generated for products sold online," and "Customer acquisition cost." Respondents were free to select as many choices as needed. However, it seems possible that when given both vague and specific choices, the respondent might choose only the most specific metric, which might artificially lower the number of companies that appear to use ROI to evaluate job performance.
Finally, another possible response to the survey question caught my eye: Brand impact. Some studies have shown that brand impact via search results is, in itself, a viable return on investment - particularly when the brand site does not have an ecommerce component, and particularly when the sites displaced on the results page are either amateurish enthusiast sites or derogatory in nature.
Still, though, take a look at the study.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at September 7, 2005 11:03 PM
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