The world of internet marketing continues to evolve. With so many different types of online marketing campaigns available to today’s marketers, the question isn’t how to market, but which type of campaign returns the highest ROI.

Given the depth and breadth of marketing tactics available to today’s marketers, it is imperative to utilize the limited manpower and online budgets for maximum return. So what types of campaigns are returning the highest ROI and generate the most excitement among search marketers? Marketing Sherpa conducted a survey amongst search marketers and they ranked each type of campaign based on how good the ROI was for each type.

Some of these results are surprising while others were completely predictable. Let’s take a look at the most and least surprising responses.

Predictable:

• Banner ads returned a high ROI for only 5% of all respondents. Only 25% of banner campaigns returned high or good ROI, while 43% resulted in a low ROI.
• SEO won the day with 69% of respondents reporting good or high ROI through SEO campaigns. This shouldn’t be all that surprising since SEO has little to no long term costs which boost ROI tremendously.
• Press Releases are split down the middle (48%high/good vs. 52% avg./low). This isn’t surprising as PR is an emerging marketing tactic so many marketers are probably still working on the best formats to gain ROI through PR.

Surprising:

• House Email has the highest percentage of high ROI responses at 25% and the second lowest amount of low ROI responses at 11%. This shows the value of a targeted and clean email list vs. the mass spamming of years past.
• The shopping engine’s reputation have been eroded almost to the point that they are on the same level of banner ads. While considered the hottest and most promising type of campaign just a few years ago, the shopping engine community has been the victim of lack of standardization and unchecked click fraud issues over the past 2 years. Clearly marketers are off the shopping bandwagon.

In a companion survey, Marketing Sherpa asked the same marketers to rate their top marketing tactics but they were limited to only the top 2 types of campaigns. The following table shows the results of this query.

• Some interesting differences can be seen in the results depending on if the marketer is marketing products or attempting to generate leads.
• Product Marketers show more faith in direct mail and banners/online advertising than do their lead marketing counterparts.
• Lead generation marketers prefer PPC and PR as tactics for returning the most qualified leads.

Both product and lead marketers see SEO as the best ROI tactic and score the tactic about the same. Both rate house email lists strongly, but lead marketers value house email a bit more than their product marketing brethren.

So what can we take out of these surveys? That a clean house email list, a well managed PPC campaign, and most importantly, a commitment to SEO are the best tactics for insuring a high ROI from internet marketing. Conversely, marketers should try to shy away from banners and shopping engines for the time being or at least until their associated costs come down to more acceptable levels.