Explanation and Details

DISC's founder and CEO, Rob Laporte, has a background perfectly suited for web marketing planning and ROI reporting. In the 1980s, Rob worked as an Assistant Account Executive in direct response marketing for a major Boston Ad agency, and later as a Project Director for a survey research firm outside Hartford, CT. This background contributed to his early and continuing focus on ROI in web marketing. It also contributes to his fascination with the current revolution in marketing wherein you can relatively easily predict and measure marketing ROAS (return on ad spend) and ROI as never before. Rob's rigorous academic background has trained him, and through him the DISC team, in using reason and evidence to arrive at sound conclusions in strategic and tactical thinking. See Rob's bio and the DISC in the News page for more.

Steady improvements in ROI-tracking software reflect demand meeting technical capability. Such software -- coupled with sage business judgment about gross and net profit, branding and "viral" marketing, lifetime value of customers, and ancillary future values in web marketing infrastructure -- ensure accurate formulation and achievement of your marketing goals. Such software includes server statistics analytics, but also includes a variety of more robust and flexible software solutions, business logic, and managerial accounting formulas.

Now you know how the other half lives (and how much they earn). You may have heard the saying, "I know that half of my advertising is working; I just don't know which half." In web marketing, you can, and therefore must, know what works and what doesn't. Rapid and justified re-allocation of marketing tactics and funds is possible in web marketing and is standard at DISC.

ROI planning can and should be done for all web marketing, not just SEM. Banner ads and PPC are the most accurately predictable and measurable, but the ROI of SEO, trusted feeds, affiliate marketing, reciprocal linking, site usability enhancements, email marketing, and, to a lesser extent, Web 2.0 marketing can also be predicted within a reasonable range and measured exactly.

A study published in July, 2004 shows that SEM delivers branding value, but this is no excuse for not predicting and measuring the ROI of search engine marketing. Nebulous branding effects have often been invoked by ad agencies to mollify dissatisfied clients. Now, as the top search engines are reportedly running out of ad inventory and as their prices are rising often beyond ROI, they have sponsored this branding study which, while reliable, should nonetheless be held under the scalpel of ROI analysis when planning your search engine marketing. In search engine advertising, the additional value (i.e. revenue) realized by brand recognition and recall can relatively easily be added into the formulas by which one predicts and measures ROI. This additional value is not much, but it is worth factoring. All things considered, we at DISC continue to believe that SEM and most web marketing should be subjected to the line-item rigor of direct response marketing.

To learn how DISC can translate ROI data into usability changes that greatly boost your web site's conversion rates, please see our page on Conversion Rate Optimization.

The ROI formulas that DISC uses to predict and measure the ROI of web marketing, while derived from standard managerial accounting, are sufficiently proprietary that we do not publish them here.