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MICHAEL J. LOPRESTI

Overcoming the
Challenges of Calculating
Digital Marketing ROI
No matter how innova
tive your use of the latest tools and technologies in digital
marketing may be, no matter how closely you follow
industry trends and implement solutions that reflect the
cutting edge in digital marketing practices, it will always
come down to the bottom lineat least, as far as your
C-level executives are concerned. Being able to demon
strate the dollar-for-dollar benefit that your marketing
efforts provide to your organization is the elusive brass
ring that marketers are perpetually striving to grasp.
The ROI of digital marketing technologies and strate
giesespecially those that employ new technologies and
practicescan be notoriously hard to measure, let alone
express cogently and concisely to your CEO or CFO.
According to a 2013 online study of digital marketers by
Adobe, 76% of survey respondents believed measuring
marketing performance was important, but only 29%
felt that they were doing it well.
Bridging that gap is a key challenge for marketers.
Part of the strategy for doing so lies in thinking critically
and creatively about how to represent something as
tangible as ROI for a set of tools and practices that can
be hard to completely quantify. Another important
part of that strategy is learning how to recalibrate the
expectations ones organization might have for digital
marketing ROI and the means of communicating about
those expectations.
Mitch Lapides is a web marketing strategist, founder,
and president of FulcrumTech, an online marketing
agency. Lapides has more than 20 years of experi
ence in strategic planning, marketing, IT management,
software product development, content licensing, and
T h e r e s r e a lly no e s c a p in g it .

Black In k s Eye On is a cloud-based SaaS too l tha t

measures d igita l m a rketing ROI.

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product management. When it comes to the drawbacks

of measuring ROI for digital marketing, Lapides says that
organizations should be aware of the challenges presented
by their data measurement systems and of measuring digi
tal marketing success directly in relation to sales.

Bridging that gap is a key

challenge for marketers.
Lots of companies dont have the rigorous data sys
tems to put together a metric, or set of metrics, that can
accurately define the ROI of their digital marketing,
Lapides says. It actually takes labor to analyze that
data. Putting the effort and the capital into tools that
will help you capture and analyze that data will go a long
way toward the goal of capturing a reliable ROI figure.
Jeff Winsper, president of Black Ink, is a member of
the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB)
and a developer of SaaS reporting software for marketers.

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He echoes the sentiment that capturing the right data is

essential for measuring marketing ROI, but that data cant
tell the whole story. He advises marketers to step back
and consider their marketing strategy from both ends of
the continuum.
Most companies think from the bottom-uplooking
at the specifics of the behavior and the traction generated
by a particular campaign, Winsper says. Sometimes,
however, the top-down approach to looking at market
ing strategies and effectiveness needs to be taken into
account as well. In that way, Winsper says, an organi
zation can look at the resources it has available as well
as its goals, and take a holistic look at its entire digital
marketing strategy.
From every perspective, however, it is data that pro
vides the backbone to the strategy. Without proper data
management, you wont have the analytical capabilities
to understand the behavior of your customers, Winsper
says. And without that, the systems you have on hand
to activate your business strategy will not be able to
reach their full potential.
Winspers company, Black Ink, provides a SaaS tool in
its cloud-based Eye On, which is a digital marketing ROI
product. The product puts an emphasis on collecting and
analyzing data across multiple facets of a marketing de
partments business practice, including customers, markets,
staff, and vendors. It reports on more than 50 interdepen
dent key performance indicators (KPIs) across marketing
ROI, customer ROI, and business ROI. It works with any
database environment, including enterprise resource plan
ning, sales force automation, marketing resource manage
ment, marketing automation, and point of sale.
But even with great data and capable analytics, deter
mining how to calculate and conceive of the ROI for a
digital marketing strategy might not be as cut-and-dry as
evaluating, for instance, how many sales were generated
by a particular campaign. ROI is not always calculated
with a sales metric, Lapides says. Companies struggle
with measuring the strategic benefit. In the old days,
radio and television were seen as awareness-building
tools. Many of the technologies we use today in digital
marketingsocial media, for instanceplay that same

continued on page 10

n e w s .&
.
p r o d u c t b r ie fs
Zinio Expands in Digital Media M arket for Libraries
Zinio (a digital newsstand and magazine app for iOS,
Android, and the web) announced a move to expand its
digital offerings for libraries by adding 1,000 magazine titles
to its digital magazine service for library patrons, including
international titles with new language content. Zinio for
Libraries is a digital magazine service offered in partnership
with RBdigital from Recorded Books.
Zinio for Libraries currently offers more than 1,800
magazines and more digital offerings are continuously
added. With Zinio for Libraries, library patrons can access
digital magazine content from hundreds of magazines by
simply registering with a library card and password. Zinio's
digital newsstand currently offers online magazines in both
English and native languages from a variety of countries.
(recordedbooks. com; zinio.com)

Offerpop Introduces Next-Generation Digital

Marketing Platform
Offerpop, a SaaS company, introduced a platform for
driving consumer action throughout the customer life
cycle. Offerpops new product suite empowers brands to
capitalize on the mobile-social marketing opportunity with
a platform that makes it easier for marketers to automate
the collection of user-generated content at scale; aggregate
data collected at each point of consumer interaction;
showcase content in real-time across all marketing
channels and devices; and generate website visits,
conversions, and revenue.
Brands can turn websites into social hubs by gathering
and showcasing user-generated photos and videos.
With Connect by Offerpop, marketers can automatically
reach out to consumers as content is submitted to collect
contact and demographic data, as well as manage
permissions for reuse.
Retailers and brands can now harness user-generated
content to drive purchases and other consumer activity.
With Activate by Offerpop, brands can enrich consumer
content with promotional content and showcase it in visual
galleries. Marketers can build consumer relationships with
a suite of mobile-optimized applications powering social
experiences across a brands social networks and owned
digital properties.
(offerpop.com)

Publishing Profitability Survey Shows Publishers

Out of Touch With Data
Publishers have surprisingly little knowledge of
which and how any third-party companiessuch as
Google, advertising vendors, and othersare accessing
continued on page 9 :

J uly/ A

ugust

2 0 1 4 EContent 7

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(Overcoming th e Challenges o f C alculating D ig ita l M a rke tin g ROI, from page 7)

kind of role. And it can be hard to assign specific value

to those tools.
For those elements of a digital marketing strategy
that dont fit cleanly into a quantifiable column of
the data spreadsheet, Lapides suggests assigning some
sort of value to them in order to track progress and,
ultimately, make decisions about allocation. When
companies look at allocating resources to various as
pects of a digital marketing strategy, Lapides says,
they need to look strategically at where the market
is, where their prospects are, what their customers
look like, and where theyve been headed as a com
pany historically. By assigning a tangible value to
otherwise intangible aspects of your digital marketing
strategy, Lapides says, you will be able to benchmark

your progress and make adjustments to your resource

allocation in order to optimize your individual digital
marketing channels.
Making sense out of how to convey the inherent and
often intangible value of certain digital marketing strate
gies and tools is one of the most significant challenges
any marketer faces when it comes to making the case
to his C-level superiors that certain strategies are work
ing and that certain strategies need increased institu
tional support in order to succeed. By thinking creatively
and strategically about how to give those upper-level
managers a sense of the real ROI for digital marketing
effortsincluding, but also beyond, the concrete sales
numbersmarketers will go a long way toward over
coming that perennial challenge. K3

(Consumers Coming to A ccept Native A dvertisin g Done Right, from page 9)

Research continues to validate that readers of these

websites are, number one, aware that the content is there
because a marketer paid to place itand, two, have
strong feelings that the content is valuable to them.
That, he says, is only going to continue to drive all of
this forward in a very positive way.
H es not alone. The State of the Media 2014
report from the Pew Research C enters Journalism
Project indicated that BIA/Kelsey estimated that native
advertising revenues reached $2.3 billion in 2013 (up
from $1.6 billion in 2012) and projected that revenues
would reach $4.6 billion by 2017.
In 2013, Forbes teamed up with IPG Media Lab and
conducted a study of the effectiveness of branded con
tent. That research indicated that branded content pro
vides better brand recall than display ads. In addition,
it was found that pairing display with branded content
serves to boost awareness.
In addition to quality, transparency is imperative, says
Weber. I think its terrible and immoral to try to hide
the fact [that its advertising], he says. The future of
marketing is about transparency and honesty and truth.
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If the content is high-quality, people dont care if some

one paid to deliver it, says Weber.
Howard agrees that content must be high-quality
to achieve desired results. At Forbes, he says, a brand
producer team that reports to him is set up with the
same structure as the editorial teambut there is a wall
between the two parts of the business. Theyve got a
managing editor, theyve got the same tools, the same
skill set. All of them were hired from other newsrooms,
or our newsroom, to take this brand producer role. And
they really work to optimize headlines, social, search
and basic copywriting so that our brands feel like theyre
being supported with the same level of support that any
body would who writes from an editorial perspective,
with the clear understanding that everybodys jobs and
roles are to be on one side of the house or the other.
Transparency rules, but content, despite the venue or
method used to deliver it, is still king, as Bill Gates told
us back in 1996. For content managers and marketers,
the ability to provide value to an audience will keep
them on the right end of the continuum between annoy
ing and useful. B

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