ROI: Online reviews vs PPC advertising

Thinking about where to spend a few marketing dollars? There's a few things to consider before deciding what route to take.

Basically, the aim of any advertising or marketing campaign, big or small, is to maximize the Return On Investment (ROI). The return on investment is the amount of revenue generated from the marketing or advertising, expressed as a percentage.

ROI

So, if you spend $100 on advertising and you earn $110 as a result of people clicking through to your site and buying stuff, then your ROI is 10%. Easy enough? The problem is that it isn't always easy to tell exactly what your return on investment is. For example, someone may click through to your site and say to themselves, "Jimminy, that's a great site. I'll come back to it when I need to spend oodles of cash.". They haven't bought anything, but they probably will down the line - but that's difficult to quantify as part of the ROI investment calculation.

The marketing ROI plot thickens

It gets slightly trickier too. What happens if you decide to pay for a website review. This review is socially integrated and permanent. Which means that you could get traffic filtering through for years to come. When do you draw a line in the sand, and say this is when I calculate the ROI?

Even more subtle, is the boost in PageRank your site may receive from the permanent backlink you get from the review site. This may increase your PageRank and lead to more organic search traffic. Someone who sees your webpages in Google, might visit and say "Wow, I never knew this site was here. I've finally got somewhere to spend my millions".

In this case, the review was indirectly responsible for that income, but it's almost impossible to discern that it came about as a result of the review.

And the winner is...

Here's the important thing though. It's the factor that I believe makes getting a product or site reviewed online far more cost effective than any advertising. Any ads you place offer absolutely no SEO or PageRank benefit because almost without exception ads are given the rel="nofollow" attribute, which tells search engines not to associate your link with the advertisers site.

In addition, as soon as your ads finish, the links disappear and you're left with nothing. Conversely, a review sits around for years and years and years. It may not generate as many click throughs as the ad did while it was running, but eventually it will. Plus it gives you the permanent backlink that helps your SEO and PageRank.

Made your decision? It's worth checking out the following sites for socially integrated website and product reviews:

• Socially integrated website and webpage listings
• SEO enhanced, book and product reviews