• by Christopher Petix , March 25, 2010

The past couple of years have been about squeezing maximum return on investment from every marketing effort. As a result, advertisers and marketers have established new parameters and broad goals for their campaigns. The good news for these groups is that there are a number of tools and techniques available to help them achieve these goals. 

 To boost the ROI from marketing campaigns, advertisers must evolve the metrics they use to monitor success. With the correct measures in place from the start of a campaign, advertisers gain valuable insight into how the campaign is actually performing.

 Traditionally, conversion rates are the flagship measurement for marketing campaigns, however, simply relying on conversion doesn't optimize ROI. It is more important to see how valuable that customer becomes for your business. Long Term Value (LTV) can be assessed through most CRM systems and enables a more in-depth and ultimately valuable evaluation of marketing activity. Identifying the consumers that deliver long term value and then analyzing where they first engaged,  boosts optimization efforts.

For advertisers, most activities to boost LTV are significantly enhanced by working in partnership with the digital marketers that execute their campaigns.

 Conversion rates will fluctuate over the campaign, but quick reactions can improve the campaign's performance. Learning from peaks and re-creating the conditions that caused them -- or recognizing a drop and turning it around immediately -- enables rapid optimization of  the campaign.

 Just as advertisers need to drive ROI, the online community of Web site publishers must continually establish, maintain and optimize revenue streams through their sites. To make this challenge more difficult, they must also balance this requirement with the need to deliver a great user experience.

Post-registration and post-action marketing put an unobtrusive offer path behind a sign-up process or customer-centric action on a site. The combination of data capture and qualification through offers that identify key interests provides a constant revenue opportunity without harming the ongoing user experience. Every marketing opportunity is built into an action that the consumer wants to engage with. As long as the offers are relevant and there is a "no thanks" option next to the "submit" button, consumers will still click through to the page they originally wanted in close to 100% of instances.

This year,  advertising and marketing should begin to pick up some serious steam. However, free-spending days are over. Advertisers must find new ways to show how well they are performing, and publishers need to prove to advertisers that they can identify new customers, engage with them and deliver ROI. This partnership of advertiser and publisher will create significant revenue streams for both parties.