It’s always hard to compare online marketing campaigns ROIs because they vary greatly. They vary between industries and products and also between campaign types.

So instead of providing hard numbers we gathered our own data and merged them with data we found online. The results are return on investment (ROI) ranges going a small 1.1x ROI for partner deals to 8x ROI for WOM/Viral campaigns.

WOM and Viral’s ROI

Word of mouth and viral online campaign projects are considered the holy grail for any web site. Who wouldn’t want to get ten and hundred of thousands (dare to dream of millions) new visitors to their site at a close to zero marginal cost? Everyone. But very few succeed. And because of the very low success rate very few also try. Is it fear of failure? Believing a site should growth on its own and that’s it? Imagining doing something that relates too much to traditional marketing? Not techie enough? Or perceived as too hard to mix techie and marketing skills? There’s always plenty of good reasons for not trying.

The truth is there’s simply too much at stake for not even trying. From wacky ideas like Blendtec’s very viral videos to viral widget like some of Facebook’s apps (truth be told there have been few successful ones and many more failures) there are so many ways you can make your content and site viral.

You can start from one of the following points by getting people to plant seeds for you (the more leverage points you use the more viral it gets):

• Taps into people’s curiosity about other people (yes, we’re all noisy at some point).
• Tap and enable people to help their close ones, friends and strangers.
• Tap into people need to waste time and being easily distracted (no reference to Facebook and Twitter)
• Tap into people little greeds (save little or big, make more…)

The bottom line is we’re all humans so build something on top of our human qualities and faults.

Word of mouth don’t have to be fancy widgets or videos (although they’re very low costs). A simple “Refer a friend” or “Send a friend” link on your pages goes a long way. It’s zero cost and you get extremely targeted traffic.

Above all, try it. Just take a few hours out there to see what’s been very effective and what’s not. More important, understand the levers successful campaigns used because at a very very low cost you can get a huge ROI.

Results: Average 8x to (theoretically) infinite return on investment.

SEO’s ROI

Ahh, the elusive SEO’s ROI… Contrary to what many may think tracking the ROI of SEO activities is not that complicated. It’s mostly a question of being persistent; you need to keep track of change you made over a long period of time. As it may take 1 to 4 months to fully see the results of seo improvement to some pages (or a whole site) this is not for people and companies with short attention span (or the the magic bullet mindset).

Even more important, SEO improvements need to be well executed. Again, this take time and dedication, not fire and forget. Don’t put your people with ADD like attitude on a SEO project. Your person(s) in charge of such projects need to be extremely well organized and detailed oriented to be successful.

In order to have a longer lasting impact your SEO project should be self-reinforcing; anyone can improve and tweak a page’s title, its meta description and keyword relevance. But creating or adding useful information and tools that people will use and link can make your site a topical trusted authority. Achieve this and your SEO ROI will jump through the roof.

The return on investment varies greatly by industry, scale of project and time spent on the project but you can easily get a 5x return on investment on any well crafted SEO improvement.

Results: Average 5x to 9x the investment

Pay per click (PPC)’s ROI

Call it PPC, Sponsored advertising or more generally, Search Marketing, at the end of the day you pay an amount per click and you get traffic. Easy to implement, easy to measure and easy to get fairly good results. More and more companies are doing such campaigns and it’s because it’s getting so easy. Very process and data oriented, so very straightforward to do.

Unless you’re working with a firm that doesn’t really know what they’re doing or have internal resources that are overloaded by other projects, achieving a reasonable ROI with PPC is fairly easy. Try it, your manager will love the results.

Results: Average of 1.3x to 2.1x your investment

Partnerships’ ROI

This category of marketing campaigns included Affiliate marketing, Partner deals with other sites and pretty much any type of online marketing activities that translated into sharing your revenues with a partner. And there lies the biggest roadblock of getting a good ROI out of partners deals; you have to share your revenue with someone else! Doing a CPA deal or revenue share and sharing 10, 20, 30% of your revenue with a partner cut your ROI by the same amount.

Affiliate deals and CPA advertising are better because you only share a percentage of your revenue. But in the cases of deals where you need to provide a partner resources involving more cost for you  (shared marketing cost, content deals, etc) these costs cut even deeper into your ROI. On top of it if these costs are recurring you can’t think of recuperating your cost and to top it all if you’re you have to constantly provide a partner with additional resources you’re stuck in a little ROI dead end.

Naturally these type of partners can easily scale if you have the resources (read investment) in place to growth and maintain them. The only issue is that scale doesn’t always equal good traffic. Affiliates are famous for bad traffic and partner sites can provides huge amount of badly targeted traffic (you’ll hear your ROI shrink).

In other words think twice or at least get into that type of online marketing activities when you have exhaust the other lower hanging fruits.

Results: Average of 1.1x-1.3x your invesment

So if you’re short of time, have a good budget and want to deliver results quickly PPC is the best road to take. You want to achieve greater results with lower budget and have more time to spend and experiment? Then go along the WOM/Viral and SEO roads. If you’re already doing the previous ones and have optimized their ROIs, or are desperate to get any type of results and large volume, then online partnerships are the way to go.

Pick your road, your strategy and then have fun while you’re on it!

Would you like to share your experiences? Feel free to do it.

Advanced Links ads can be considered the ancestors of the ever more popular and richer widgets. Even if their functionalies are usually very limited (using 2 or 3 pull downs with a choice of answers), they provide strong engagement.

We have tested advanced links with many advertisers in different industries over many years and they brought every time a huge click-through (CTR) lift over tradional banner. An added benefit is also a lift in landing page conversions (CR).

The data below is statistically significant (+99%) and represent averages for a large spectrum of advertisers. Quick note: these results are in the same order of magnitude at the individual advertiser level.

Lift 1: Clickthrough (CTR%)

Who doesn’t want a 103% CTR lift?

Obviously many advertisers. Why does not more advertiser test advanced links ads and compare them to their banner? We often hear it’s a question of being able to have the ad’s selection of choices integrated or linked to the relevant landing page but this is not something that hard to do. A developper will only require a couple of hours to provide a potentially huge impact on your bottom line.

Some may say having such a lift may also bring a lower conversion rate. Our findings show it’s not the case…

Lift 2: Conversions (CR%)

Who doesn’t want a 2% conversion lift? Similar question, similar answer.

Getting people more engaged right at the beginning of their experience is clearly a great advantage as it also bring an increase in conversions.

This can be explained in 2 ways:

1. Engagement: Having people more engaged early on make them more engaged later on too.
2. Less steps: Using advanced links in ads let people start their discovery process earlier and saves steps later on. Whether it’s a sale or a lead form, letting people choose early what they want save them steps later on. Less steps = higher conversions.

Lets take the example of someone looking for a specific financial service product. If that person is looking to receive information about a financial service you can present them an advance link ad with a first pull down with a choice of different financial services, a 2nd pull down for the stage they are in their buying process and a 3rd one for, lets say, their family income.

The combination of answers gives you many actionable information to decided which landing page is better for them: the product, buying stage and family income choices let you present them automatically the most relevant landing page. The same objective is persued when you tie your landing pages to different PPC campaigns’ ads: you don’t send all you PPC clicks to the same page. Using advanced links ads provide you do the same advantage with banners and buttons.

Total lift 107%. Advanced links can be applied to almost any advertisers, products or services. Simply think about the choices a visitor needs to make on your site in order to complete your form or its purchase. Is there ways you can simplify your advertised visitors life (and yours) by engaging visitors early on with advance links ads? Almost anyone should be able to do this.

You may ask why we’re showing higher than average click-through and conversions % in the results above. This is accomplished with segmention and targeting. Presenting the right ad to the right person can go a long way. More on this in an upcoming post.

You may wonder if there are also ways to see an even bigger conversions lift from advance links (or also any other ads). There is; carry your ads’ scent to your landing pages. This will also be the subject of another post in the coming weeks.

There is a case to be made to use advance links ads in a CPM or CPA advertising model. You’re already paying for the impressions so getting highers CTR directly improve your ROI. But using these ads on advertising networks with in PPC model can be tricky if you did not improve your landing pages; you’ll see a CTR lift, higher cost but not necessarely a lift in conversions. If you are in the later case we advise you to proceed carefully.

• Web analytics: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik needs to be read if you’re interested in website analytics. Avinash is also the author of Web Analytics and Hour a Day and he’s actually a consultant and Analytics Evangelist at Google. There are goldmines of useful information in your web analytics (you have one installed don’t you?) and Avinash shows you the ins and outs.
• Site Optimization: Jonathan Mendez’ blog and OTTO Digital’s blogs talk about landing page optimization, site optimization, in other words everything you can dream about online optimization. As Reflexity is heavily involved in that space it’s always interesting to read their findings and learn from their experiences. More than a must.
• Online media and marketing insights: Charlene Li’s blog talks about her experiences and findings about how social media, social marketing & networking are influencing the way business use these technologies online. Charlene is VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research and covers their social computing and web 2.0 research. Insightful.
• Viral Marketing, user experience and online advertising: Andrew Chen’s Futuristic Play will provide you with comments, tips, and ideas about users/customers acquisition and how to keep them. His blog is much more than that but these subjects alone will really be worth your time. We can’t wait to see what will be his next business!
• Persuasion, conversions & marketing: GrokDotCom’s blog posts are about online persuasion; from persuasive architecture to content persuasion/copywriting and everything in between. The goal is to make easier for people to convert into a sale, a registration or a lead. Tons of very valuable information.
• Online banking: Colin Henderson’s The Bank Watch brings a bowl of fresh air with the latest trends, news and experiences with online banking. Colin is a firm believer in embracing new technologies and ideas to reach consumers and enhance their experience. So are we. Kudos Colin!

Ok, so we had more a top 6 instead of a top 5. We couldn’t leave one out. Lets be original and call it our top 6.

What are your best blogs? We’re curious to know…

So you may ask, why change name?

After a few years we drifted away from our original starting point as a company (read we followed our clients’ needs and the money) plus we didn’t have anything to do with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) anymore.

Although we still deal with customers everyday, our focal point and passion moved to new horizons (and new buzzwords); marketing, optimization, targeting, social networks, intent, scent, social marketing, crowd sourcing, behaviour, etc.

In a nutshell, we are now more than ever finding new ways to build new relationships with consumers for their benefit and the companies serving them. In a few more words, we are providing campaign management and lead generation, customers acquisition, marketing and revenue optimization services to large and mid size companies in the United States with a strong core in financial services.

We are a data driven company with a busy right brain.

This may sound very nice but why choose the name Reflexity?

We define reflexity [ree-flek-si-tee] as the result of something being reflexive (self-learning):

• In Mathematics, reflexity refers to self-related elements. In today’s world people have more than ever relationships and these relationships are more than ever important. Translated into marketing we bring together apparently different and unrelated consumers who share related intent and purpose.
• In Computing, reflexity relates to actions of a program to self modify its structure. Our company, services, solutions and people learn to adept to an ever evolving environment for everyone’s benefits.
• In Logic, reflexity relates to adding two actions in order to get a true value. Our services find the right set of actions and solutions to create successful (true) results.

This may sound complicated, maybe a bit. Who said everything was easy; success comes from thinking things through and hard work. Don’t worry, we’re not taking ourselves too seriously and we have the numbers to prove our successes.

Welcome to our world, welcome to Reflexity.

And Happy New Year from all of us!