As usual, Jeffrey Eisenberg got me thinking. He was commenting on an interesting post about the cost (and intellectual ingredients) of developing a single landing page, and offered some ideas about indirect costs associated with that page (analysis, testing, etc.) which should also be considered when measuring ROI. He ends challenging agencies to defend their own ROI.

Why isn't there an easy way to collect the fixed and variable costs associated with a web page and then look at the ROI of that web page? Or a campaign?

In Omniture SiteCatalyst it's possible to use SAINT to assign the landing page associated with each keyword in paid search, and then see the expense, revenue, and ROAS. But assigning landing pages to tens of thousands of keywords is A LOT of work. The software knows which landing page each paid click arrived at - couldn't this be automatically populated? (hm, rule-based classifications, there's an idea...)

The problem is harder for other traffic sources. Even if you know the variable costs associated with clicks coming from other sources it can be very hard to get that data into the system. And assigning values in SAINT classifications against the tracking codes doesn't help because you can't do calculations against that data. I'd imagine Omniture Genesis connections properly pass this data from email and some other sources, but it's impractical to assume that you have that level of integration for all traffic sources.

A default classification of variable cost for each tracking code and fixed cost for each campaign name - both of which could be mathematically operated on as calculated metrics - would address this issue.

The idea of assigning a fixed cost to a campaign and having it automagically allocated across all of the activity for that campaign would be very interesting. What if we could see the ROI for a campaign based its direct variable costs, these variable costs plus direct fixed costs, these fixed and variable costs plus an allocation of staffing costs, etc? The numbers may be scary but the honest evaluation of these programs would be quite interesting.

The idea of a page having a fixed cost associated with it is interesting too, although in many cases assigning the combined fixed costs at the campaign level would be sufficient. However it's implemented there's little doubt there is a 'real world gap' between the available reporting in most current analytic software and the way marketers really consider and evaluate these campaigns. Implementing more complete cost accounting would go a long way to close this gap.