You’d think that the big news from a recent survey of 1,000 marketers by digital marketing firm Econsultancy and services provider ExactTarget would be that companies say they’ll spend more on digital media this year and they did in 2009—17% more on average, to be precise. It’s been the kind of year where a substantial investment in online campaigns should make a respectable splash.

Still, that hike is no big surprise, you say: Digital is measurable, and metrics lead to benchmarks and assurances of return on spending. These companies are simply migrating their money to channels that can produce the best provable performance at the least cost.

Not so fast. It turns out, the study reveals, that one of the online channels likely to get the biggest increase in marketing budget this year is the one that the large majority of respondents say is the hardest to measure, with the worst-understood ROI: social media.

The study, “Marketing Budgets 2010”, found that 66% of responding companies said they would be increasing their digital marketing spending in 2010, and another 30% said they will keep to the same online spending levels they had last year. Only 4% say they’re looking at cutting their digital budgets for the year.

Putting that figure up against the 46% who say they will increase their overall marketing budgets this year and the 42% who said those figures will remain the same, Econsultancy and ExactTarget estimate that about 28% of the companies surveyed plan to shift marketing dollars from traditional offline channels (direct mail, telemarketing, and broadcast and print ads) to digital.

Keeping it in perspective, the survey found that digital makes up an average of 24% of an overall marketing budget, so that 17% hike is on a fairly small base.

Still, it’s interesting to see where those online spending increases will go, or rather, where the respondents said they are most interested in upping their spending this year. Leading the way, off-site social media, where 73% of those polled said they will increase their budgets this year. “Off-site” means taking campaigns to the Facebooks and YouTubes of the world, the palces that are already drawing traffic in droves, as opposed to building a social community on one’s own Web site and convincing users to show up. But that will happen too; 61% of companies said they will spend more to build those on-site social centers this year.

Next to see a budget increase is mobile marketing, with 59% of the survey reporting they will spend more to reach people on their mobile devices this year.

E-mail budgets will increase this year too. The study found that 55% of respondents intend to increase spending on acquisition e-mail this year ; they also report an equal expected increase in spending on retention e-mail.

After that, search engine optimization will get more dollars from 54% of the survey pool. The number of respondents who project spending increases on paid search in 2010 is smaller—34%– but still healthy, since pay-per-click (PPC) ads make up the largest portion of total search spending.

And bringing up the rear—although still posting decent increases—are affiliate marketing (30% will spend more, though 18% will cut budgets) and online display ads (30% up, 24% cutting back.)

Those projections, interesting in themselves, become more so when combined with questions that asked respondents what channels were most likely to provide them with reliable evaluations of the return they were getting on their investments. Actually the question asked participants to rate their ability to measure ROI in those channels. So the results could speak either to the firmness of the metrics in the channels, or simply to marketers’ assessments of their own measurement talents.

Anyway, here paid search came out on top, as you might expect; one click, one payment to Google—pretty straightforward. Fifty-four percent of respondents said their ROI measurement in PPC was “good”. And 53% and 50% said they had “good” ability to measure ROI in acquisition and retention e-mail respectively.

But here’s the interesting part. Social media (both on-site and off-) and mobile trailed the list in terms of being able to get a good fix on ROI. In social, only 19% and 17% said they had a good ability to measure ROI from on-site and off-site social media respectively, while 38% and 40% rated their measurement abilities as “poor”. For mobile, 17% said they could get a good metric picture and 43% said a bad one.

If those categories have such poor ROI visibility, why do more marketers report an interest in pouring more money into social and mobile than into e-mail or search? In fact, given the measurability mantra, why are those channels getting any increased funding at all?

Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy, who co-authored the report, says the answer may be in the question the survey was designed to answer: What drives marketers to re-allocate budgets?

“We wanted to know how these decisions are made. Are they based on hard financial numbers, or softer metrics such as customer satisfaction?” he says. “And we found that people are not investing o social media because they can measure ROI; there’s something else going on there.

“What popped out of the data is that a bigger driver, the one that most correlates with this move to social media, is brand reputation. Companies who measure their marketing effectiveness by brand reputation are much more likely to be shifting dollars into social media than those who don’t,” Stewart says.

The ExactTarget/Econsultancy study found that most companies use a mix of hard and soft metrics to calculate the effectiveness of their marketing programs. That’s particularly true in the U.S., where only 7.2% of respondents said they assess marketing “entirely based on hard financial metrics” (compared to 17.8% of U.K. respondents) and 37.5%, the largest group, said they use “mainly hard financial metrics, some softer metrics” such as customer satisfaction or loyalty.

But that 37.5% is outweighed by the proportion of U.S. marketers who said they either use a 50-50 mix of hard and soft metrics (23.4%) or employ “mainly softer metrics, some financials” (23.7%). Marketers are softer on this side of the pond; only 13.*% of U.K. respondents copped to using “mainly softer metrics”.

Nevertheless, the concrete financials got the most votes in the measurement beauty contest portion of the survey. Asked what metrics they use to judge marketing effectiveness, most of those polled cited incremental sales (79%), increased traffic to Web site (71%), and ROI (65%). Web traffic is a proxy measurement, but at least it points t whether a campaign is working.

After that, things get a bit more touchy-feely. Customer retention was cited by 50% of the survey group, and customer satisfaction/advocacy/net promoter score came in at 44%. Increased profitability, a hard metric I would have expected to rank higher, came in sixth position with 43% of the vote, barely edging out brand reputation (41%) and brand recognition (39%). And bringing up the rear: customer lifetime value (27%).

Stewart says statistical analysis shows that the companies most interested in brand reputation were also the most likely to be allocating new funds for social media.

“What I take out of that is that this move toward social media is fueled by something other than ROI,” he says. “That’s not to say that ROI is not important; it clearly is, and people want to measure it. But something else is drawing marketers to social media.

“Based on our research and other work I’ve seen, that driver seems to be a combination of fear and opportunity. There’s a valid fear that consumers are out there bashing your brand in blogs and social media, and that if you’re not out there listening, bad things will happen and you won’t know about it. And if you do participate, you’ll be able to buoy your image among consumers.”

Those impulses to protect and grow brand reputation are the primary drivers to social media marketing. By contrast, ROI is a “trailing metric” for that kind of marketing. Somebody somewhere will figure out a way to unearth the link between a strong Facebook campaign today and a sales uptick next week. But for now, marketers will take the softer tonic effects to their brand images and be happy.

You’d think that the big news from a recent survey of 1,000 marketers by digital marketing firm Econsultancy and services provider ExactTarget would be that companies say they’ll spend more on digital media this year and they did in 2009—17% more on average, to be precise. It’s been the kind of year where a substantial investment in online campaigns should make a respectable splash.

Still, that hike is no big surprise, you say: Digital is measurable, and metrics lead to benchmarks and assurances of return on spending. These companies are simply migrating their money to channels that can produce the best provable performance at the least cost.

Not so fast. It turns out, the study reveals, that one of the online channels likely to get the biggest increase in marketing budget this year is the one that the large majority of respondents say is the hardest to measure, with the worst-understood ROI: social media.

The study, “Marketing Budgets 2010”, found that 66% of responding companies said they would be increasing their digital marketing spending in 2010, and another 30% said they will keep to the same online spending levels they had last year. Only 4% say they’re looking at cutting their digital budgets for the year.

Putting that figure up against the 46% who say they will increase their overall marketing budgets this year and the 42% who said those figures will remain the same, Econsultancy and ExactTarget estimate that about 28% of the companies surveyed plan to shift marketing dollars from traditional offline channels (direct mail, telemarketing, and broadcast and print ads) to digital.

Keeping it in perspective, the survey found that digital makes up an average of 24% of an overall marketing budget, so that 17% hike is on a fairly small base.

Still, it’s interesting to see where those online spending increases will go, or rather, where the respondents said they are most interested in upping their spending this year. Leading the way, off-site social media, where 73% of those polled said they will increase their budgets this year. “Off-site” means taking campaigns to the Facebooks and YouTubes of the world, the palces that are already drawing traffic in droves, as opposed to building a social community on one’s own Web site and convincing users to show up. But that will happen too; 61% of companies said they will spend more to build those on-site social centers this year.

Next to see a budget increase is mobile marketing, with 59% of the survey reporting they will spend more to reach people on their mobile devices this year.

E-mail budgets will increase this year too. The study found that 55% of respondents intend to increase spending on acquisition e-mail this year ; they also report an equal expected increase in spending on retention e-mail.

After that, search engine optimization will get more dollars from 54% of the survey pool. The number of respondents who project spending increases on paid search in 2010 is smaller—34%– but still healthy, since pay-per-click (PPC) ads make up the largest portion of total search spending.

And bringing up the rear—although still posting decent increases—are affiliate marketing (30% will spend more, though 18% will cut budgets) and online display ads (30% up, 24% cutting back.)

Those projections, interesting in themselves, become more so when combined with questions that asked respondents what channels were most likely to provide them with reliable evaluations of the return they were getting on their investments. Actually the question asked participants to rate their ability to measure ROI in those channels. So the results could speak either to the firmness of the metrics in the channels, or simply to marketers’ assessments of their own measurement talents.

Anyway, here paid search came out on top, as you might expect; one click, one payment to Google—pretty straightforward. Fifty-four percent of respondents said their ROI measurement in PPC was “good”. And 53% and 50% said they had “good” ability to measure ROI in acquisition and retention e-mail respectively.

But here’s the interesting part. Social media (both on-site and off-) and mobile trailed the list in terms of being able to get a good fix on ROI. In social, only 19% and 17% said they had a good ability to measure ROI from on-site and off-site social media respectively, while 38% and 40% rated their measurement abilities as “poor”. For mobile, 17% said they could get a good metric picture and 43% said a bad one.

If those categories have such poor ROI visibility, why do more marketers report an interest in pouring more money into social and mobile than into e-mail or search? In fact, given the measurability mantra, why are those channels getting any increased funding at all?

Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy, who co-authored the report, says the answer may be in the question the survey was designed to answer: What drives marketers to re-allocate budgets?

“We wanted to know how these decisions are made. Are they based on hard financial numbers, or softer metrics such as customer satisfaction?” he says. “And we found that people are not investing o social media because they can measure ROI; there’s something else going on there.

“What popped out of the data is that a bigger driver, the one that most correlates with this move to social media, is brand reputation. Companies who measure their marketing effectiveness by brand reputation are much more likely to be shifting dollars into social media than those who don’t,” Stewart says.

The ExactTarget/Econsultancy study found that most companies use a mix of hard and soft metrics to calculate the effectiveness of their marketing programs. That’s particularly true in the U.S., where only 7.2% of respondents said they assess marketing “entirely based on hard financial metrics” (compared to 17.8% of U.K. respondents) and 37.5%, the largest group, said they use “mainly hard financial metrics, some softer metrics” such as customer satisfaction or loyalty.

But that 37.5% is outweighed by the proportion of U.S. marketers who said they either use a 50-50 mix of hard and soft metrics (23.4%) or employ “mainly softer metrics, some financials” (23.7%). Marketers are softer on this side of the pond; only 13.*% of U.K. respondents copped to using “mainly softer metrics”.

Nevertheless, the concrete financials got the most votes in the measurement beauty contest portion of the survey. Asked what metrics they use to judge marketing effectiveness, most of those polled cited incremental sales (79%), increased traffic to Web site (71%), and ROI (65%). Web traffic is a proxy measurement, but at least it points t whether a campaign is working.

After that, things get a bit more touchy-feely. Customer retention was cited by 50% of the survey group, and customer satisfaction/advocacy/net promoter score came in at 44%. Increased profitability, a hard metric I would have expected to rank higher, came in sixth position with 43% of the vote, barely edging out brand reputation (41%) and brand recognition (39%). And bringing up the rear: customer lifetime value (27%).

Stewart says statistical analysis shows that the companies most interested in brand reputation were also the most likely to be allocating new funds for social media.

“What I take out of that is that this move toward social media is fueled by something other than ROI,” he says. “That’s not to say that ROI is not important; it clearly is, and people want to measure it. But something else is drawing marketers to social media.

“Based on our research and other work I’ve seen, that driver seems to be a combination of fear and opportunity. There’s a valid fear that consumers are out there bashing your brand in blogs and social media, and that if you’re not out there listening, bad things will happen and you won’t know about it. And if you do participate, you’ll be able to buoy your image among consumers.”

Those impulses to protect and grow brand reputation are the primary drivers to social media marketing. By contrast, ROI is a “trailing metric” for that kind of marketing. Somebody somewhere will figure out a way to unearth the link between a strong Facebook campaign today and a sales uptick next week. But for now, marketers will take the softer tonic effects to their brand images and be happy.