Last week's issue of PR NEWS reported a new Ketchum survey of almost 500 marcom executives which revealed that 90 percent use ROI assessment to determine a marketing project's success.
Turn to page 7 for the rundown of the ROI tools those execs are using to gauge PR impact from most- to least-used:
Seeing what others are doing in the area of ROI may give you fodder for how you approach measurement. Below we provide the percentage of nearly 500 surveyed marketing execs using a specific tool to measure ROI:
| The ROI Hot List | |
| Sales volume increase | 61 percent |
| Number of leads | 60 percent |
| Distribution (number of press releases, pieces of direct mail, news releases and other information sent out or delivered) | 59 percent |
| Number of new customers resulting from marketing | 58 percent |
| Awareness changes (percentage increase of customers/prospects awareness of product/service) | 57 percent |
| Web hits | 54 percent |
| Impressions (number of articles multiplied by potential readership of each pub) | 53 percent |
| Reach (circulation of articles and advertisements, plus distribution of literature) | 53 percent |
| Content analysis (number of key messages picked up in the stories) | 45 percent |
| Advertising effectiveness (target audience delivery, awareness/recall, research completed by trade pubs, etc.) | 44 percent |
| Advertising equivalence (column inches or air time multiplied by ad rates) | 37 percent |
| Comprehension (level of customer/prospect knowledge of product/service | 34 percent |
| Baseline and follow-up opinion change surveys | 33 percent |
| Ratio of marketing spending to sales volumes | 30 percent |
| Source: Ketchum | |