Digital Marketing ROI: Which Channels Are Winning? [2020 Data]

There are tons of channels you can add to your marketing strategy.

Typically, the process is to use content to bring people into the funnel via search engines. But you’ve also got social media, email marketing, and paid advertising in the mix.

How do you know which channel is the best place to spend your time?

The team at Databox recently surveyed hundreds of businesses. The goal: To find which marketing channel provides the best ROI.

In this post, we’ll dive into the top five channels to figure out why they’re so effective.

1. Content marketing and SEO

Content marketing comes out on top as the best channel for getting a return on your marketing investment. That’s likely because Google receives over 75,000 searches per second—some of which are people looking for your product or service.

However, Jenna Alburger of Outlier Creative says: “It’s easy to overlook the ROI of our content marketing and SEO activities because the conversion funnel is longer and there are more steps before a customer completes a goal.”

“It’s not as easy as calculating the ROI of a paid ad, for example, where the attribution model is more simple. But, we find that content marketing is by far one of the highest performing channels over the long-term.”

“On average, our clients see that people who subscribe to their blog are 50% more likely to become paying customers than non-subscribers. That’s a big difference.”

2. Email marketing

Research shows that for every dollar invested in email marketing, the average return is $42.

Andrei Vasilescu of DontPayFull explains: “Our primary metric is the number of qualified leads captured and our secondary metric is the number of website visits.”

“Capturing qualified leads can be best achieved from email marketing. Hence, we track the ROI of our email marketing effort—it has the ability to produce engagement and relation with the audience.”

“So, this digital marketing method is best to generate the maximum number of potential leads, build brand loyalty and most importantly helps to build a long subscriber list,” Vasilescu adds.

3. Organic social

Almost everyone in the world has at least one social media account—hence why 91% of businesses are currently using some form of social media marketing.

Despite that saturation, it’s still one of the best channels for driving ROI.

BuyEssayClub’s Nicholas Parker explains that you can track this with consumption metrics: “A good way to have a starting point is to analyze how many shares we usually have in our articles and calculate an average.”

“To do this we can use Buzzsumo, enter our domain and look at the bookmarks of each social network. Then add them up and divide by the number of posts analyzed.”

4. Paid search

Similar to SEO, paid search makes your website visible to people searching for keywords similar to your product or service offering. The only difference is you pay to take the top spots, rather than doing SEO work to earn your position there.

Allie Danziger explains how they track the ROI of paid search at Integrate Agency: “In one row, we’ll show a summary of monthly clicks, impressions, and the month’s CTR.  We then create a second row to show the number of conversions, conversion rate and the CPA.”

“Finally, in a third row, we’ll calculate the CPC, CPM and the overall total cost.”

“Our team is looking at this on a daily basis, sometimes hourly, to analyze trends and make adjustments. We share with clients weekly to talk through leads and what is actually converting,” Danziger adds.

5. Paid social

You can pay to advertise on almost every social platform you can think of.

Thankfully, it’s one of the easiest channels to check—which might be why it’s rated as one of the highest-performing channels.

Jasmine Hippe of Augurian explains: “As a PPC marketer, I always start my ROI analysis by calculating ROAS (return on ad spend). This metric tells you the revenue earned for the amount you spent on ads, but doesn’t factor in other costs such as the cost of goods sold.”

“ROAS is an especially useful metric for businesses that are able to tie revenue directly to digital marketing efforts.”

Final thoughts

Content marketing is the channel that drives the highest ROI for businesses, but that might be different for your business. The best channel depends on your audience and the product you’re selling.

So, spend some time digging into your dashboards. Take a look at the revenue you’re generated for each channel, and compare that to your spend (be that monetary or time-based.)

Whichever comes out on-top is your highest-performing channel.