Over at Ambergreen they did a blog piece on return on investment etc. Nice enough little piec, makes sense, nothing to make me disagree it’s nice (damned by faint praise I know). Anyway towards the end of it they user the term “cost per influence” and I have no idea how on earth you measure the cost per influence of an online marketing channel.
Cost per influence is mentioned on only 3,430 webpages (according to Google by doing a quick intext:”cost per influence” search) . And some of these date back to 2005 so its not exactly a term setting the heather alight with online conversations and interest. And to be honest I think the whole concept may be wrong.
The great love that I, and lots of businesses, have for online marketing is that its quantifiable. I make a PPC advert up I bid 10 pence of every forty people I get a sale. The sale costs me £4.00 and I make a couple of quid back as profit. If its not profitable I do some refinement, if it’s not profitable I turn it off or keep going with it accepting that revenue generation is more important and that other high return keywords will subsidise this one. With every channel its the same – we spent ‘x’ and we got ‘y’ as our return.
By starting to bring in concepts such as “cost per influence” everything beomces fluffy. Less empirical. Not based in numbers and we’re unable to define cost and benefit. There is a link between having strong PPC and a strong SEO campaign (PPC can beomce tactical and SEO more strategic by working together). But no agency goes in and says if you spend an extra couple of quid on PPC you’re SEO will benefit due to the growth in brand equity, and this means you can cut back on your SEO investment. And why? because:
- they know they can’t prove it
They know that banner advertising will always cost you a fortune and deliver only marginal results (marginal compared to PPC, SEO, email etc). Accept it. It’s expensive: that’s why most agencies will tell you banner advertising helps with ‘branding’ – my friend colin once described “branding as the excuse you give for not making sales” and I agree whole heartedly. Measuring brand equity online is a fools errand – it can’t be quantified. And if it can’t be quantified should we really be bringing it into online marketing. Just because your brand was mentioned 20 times in one tweeting day doesn’t indiciate that your campaign worked.
Cost per influence looks remarkably like the excuses made for campaigns that were for “branding”. Online marketing is about proving causality between action and result. I’m not saying that online advertising cant have a benefit in developing brand equity etc. Rather than you should not view these kind of fluffy, unquantifiable variables as something of use to your campaign.
Online campaigns generate return, clients invest to make returns and achieve targets. Multichannel analysis may indiciate cross campaign pollonation and benefit. But an indiciation of something is not evidence, and saying that some one came through one channel and bought on another without a clear factual basisis wrong.
Here endeth the rant for today. Feel better.
