Carefully thought-out campaign attribution can show your SEO campaign’s true value to your business. Settling on a model which paints the least-wrong picture is your starting point, but pretty quickly you can make your model sing, providing real value and efficiency to your marketing budget blend.
Recently, I was asked to help a business answer a question: how can I make £5 million of marketing spend deliver as much value as £15 million had previously?
For lots of agencies, this will be a common question type. Companies with bloated post-recession marketing budgets are trying to piece back together cross-channel marketing budgets to gain an edge over their competition and their mantra this time ’round is efficiency.
Obvious questions arose: which channel delivered the most revenue? How do you measure ROI right now? And, my favourite: are your analytics accurate?
Pretty quickly, I was able to establish that they were keen to rewrite their approach across the board as they had a good understanding of the efficiency available from smart online campaigns across the marketing mix. They were insistent that TV would remain a chunk of that mix due to their market. (Sadly, I’ll have to leave the exact market obscure but feel free to assume a highly competitive market with a long history in online marketing. Also: it’s not retail.)
Oh, they also need to consider 7-8 key country targets in a mix of languages.
This seemed like an opportunity to build from the ground up the ideal marketing mix with all facets of the marketing budget allocated to deliver the biggest combined bang for the buck.
Building An Efficient Marketing Mix
There are a couple of big-button areas where the mix priority will be obvious in this case:
Your remaining big ticket item to consider is the large monthly budget balance between PPC spend, offline and SEO execution (whether agency or in-house time). Again, modelling for each of these channels will tell you the risk you are incurring in cutting budget. I strongly urge using at least a time-weighted attribution model to inject a little sophistication into your decision.
In the case of this specific query, what was my outcome?
The size of the technical SEO prize and the multinational aspect suggests the biggest returns will come from weighting efficient mid-tail SEO and PPC campaigns heavily across the top three countries. With the platform as a whole benefitting from the technical quick wins, general SEO performance will improve dramatically, and landing pages will deliver better Quality Scores for efficient supporting PPC campaigns across the board.
A small test run offline campaign in each target territory, correctly tagged, will indicate the final size of budget allowed to remain in offline. If the tests fail a set ROI target using our best-guess attribution model, then they get funnelled into late-stage campaign PPC budgets with display and mobile PPC activity being ramped up in the biggest target market (the US).
Affiliate marketing, sadly, does not have a bright future in this mix. In this case, an overly generous affiliate deal due to a saturation of competitors in the market, backed by Google’s heavy clamp down on affiliates’ ability to take large inventory and prosper in SEO, has killed ability to drive cheaper traffic, so a lower value deal likely won’t get many takers.
Reviewing performance after the first offline ad would set the full year marketing blend mix. Performance against some simple KPIs can trigger extra budget and a slow climb back the pre-recession days with a much healthier, underlying mix and a more competitive offering.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
