Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
A short time ago, Moz released the 2014 Industry Survey results. We collected data from over 3,700 marketers spanning more than 80 countries around the globe.
Thanks to new analysis tools from Survey Monkey we are able to slice the data many different ways to gain insight into the demographics, tools, and tactics of online marketers living everywhere. One popular data set we wanted to examine in detail is the salaries of online marketers.
Transparency in salary data helps everyone make better decisions, and knowing the factors most associated with changes in salary can help you advance your career.
The average salary of online marketers
If you include all 3,700 respondents in our analysis, we arrive at a average salary calculated from the midpoint of the survey ranges:
Note that the almost half the respondents, or 49.1%, were from the United States, which greatly influences this number.
Things start to get interesting when we break down salaries by country. Here are the average salaries of the countries with the highest number of survey participants. All salaries are converted to US dollars.
Australia leads the pack in online marketing salaries, with the United States close behind. (For many countries, the number of responses were too few to draw a conclusion with any statistical confidence. For example, the data shows Japanese marketers are very well paid, but only three marketers from Japan responded to the survey.)
Update: In the comments below, marketers from India have indicated the figure of $26,724 seems way too high for that country. It’s certainly possible, as the the lowest option on the survey was $0-$30,000, and we used the midpoint of that range for calculation.
Apparently, the salary buckets we designed with our mostly Western audience are not one-size-fits-all.
Here is the raw data for India only, which might paint a more accurate picture.
| Answer Options | Response Percent | Response Count |
| < $30000 | 63.2 | 134 |
| $30,000-45,000 | 9.9 | 21 |
| $45,000-60,000 | 3.8 | 8 |
| $60,000-75,000 | 1.9 | 4 |
| $75,000-100,000 | 1.4 | 3 |
| $100,000-150,000 | 0.9 | 2 |
| $150,000-250,000 | 0 | 0 |
| > 250000 | 0.9 | 2 |
| I’d rather not say | 17.9 | 38 |
Salary by role / job title
We also broke down salary by the specific field and job title the marketer worked in. No surprise, engineers commanded the highest salary, closely followed by user experience professionals.
It’s unfortunate to see web designers and social media professionals make less than the average salaries. These are extremely valuable roles that often garner outsized returns in company investment. Hopefully the perception of the value of these jobs begins to change.
What is surprising is to see SEO and content professionals in the middle-lower portion of the pack.
It appears that the more skills you add to your toolkit, and the more you become a T-shaped marketer, the higher your long-term earning potential.
Salary by years of experience and age
If there is one factor that seems more closely tied to your earning level than any other, it’s the number of years of experience that you have.
Folks working over 10 years in the industry blew everyone else out of the water. This trend was consistent across all job types and all countries examined. The longer you have worked in the field, the more you make.
Another consistent earnings trend is age. Simply put, older online marketers tend to have higher salaries than younger folks, who presumably have less experience on average.
The survey did have a couple of respondents under the age of 18 who reported earning more than $100,000 per year. Although we have every reason to believe their claim, we lacked enough data points to make a confident conclusion.
The gap: salary by gender
Although women have made great progress in joining the ranks of online marketers, as an industry we still have a ways to go in terms of pay equality.
For reference, the number of female respondents in 2014 was 28%, up from 21% when we ran the survey in 2012.
On average, those same women earned more than $10,000 less in salary than their average counterparts.
When we compare men and women by how long they’ve worked in the industry, a pattern starts to emerge which might help explain the gap.
The chart below graphs percentage of all men and women against years of experience. While online marketing is still a male-dominated industry, in the past the imbalance was even worse. Hence, for today at least, more men have more years of experience behind them.
If this explained it, we would expect women and men to earn roughly equal salaries for equal years of experience. In reality, this isn’t true.
While women marketers with between 1-3 years of experience actually earn slightly more than their male counterparts, the salary gap increases dramatically as the years of experience rise.
As the chart below shows, a male marketer with between 5-10 years of experience earns an average of $15,000 more than a female with the same amount of experience. The gap grows even larger with 10 or more years experience to an amazing $30,000 difference between men and women.
Let’s hope these numbers start to shift, especially with the increasing number of women now entering the field. It’s hopeful to see the younger generation actually pull ahead of male salaries in many areas.
Salary by education
How much does formal education play a role in your salary?
Hopefully not much, when you consider that one of our founders dropped out of college just two classes before graduation.
While having a doctoral degree pays off (hat tip to Dr. Pete), the benefit of having a master’s degree compared to a 4-year degree is almost nothing. This is an industry were the successful are largely self-taught, and most people continue to learn by experience, which is likely why experience seems to play such a heavy role in compensation levels.
In the future, as more colleges and learning institutions offer programs in online marketing, we may see a time when a person’s degree plays a more significant role in salary potential than it does today.
More data than you can poke a stick at
This is only a small sampling of the data we collected for the 2014 Industry Survey.
For anyone who wants to run their own analysis, Moz has made the complete data set available under a Creative Commons license. You are free to use it for research to slice and dice any way you choose.
You can see a great example of this from the folks at Digital 22, who put together this breakdown of online marketing salaries in the UK using the survey data.
Now, let’s go ask for a raise.
Note: An earlier version of the post referred to salary medians. In actuality, the calculations reported reflect weighted averages of the medians within each salary range. Hence, the term “average” more accurately reflects how we calculated salary figures.
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