by mattobrien on December 12, 2011

Clients spend money on paid search marketing, usually to attract customers, drive sales and increase profits. The campaign often has specific targets for sales volumes, customer acquisition costs and ROI. But is it fair to make these the sole responsibility of the campaign and the only means by which it is measured?

Many years ago in a previous agency life an enlightened client once said, it’s your job to get quality traffic to the site and it’s my job to convert them. Never has a truer word been spoken, sadly it is seldom repeated.

The best job that a paid search campaign can do is to drive large numbers of qualified and relevant traffic to the most appropriate page of the clients’ website. After that the baton is passed and the responsibility for conversion lies with the website, not the paid search campaign.

That’s not to say that the paid search campaign shouldn’t be judged by sales, but there are so many things that are or aren’t done ‘post click’ that impact on the customers likelihood to buy.

Product and pricing will always be key, if you don’t have it, or if you aren’t competitively priced then sales will always be an uphill battle. However you can get these right and still fall down during the conversion process.

Is your website transaction process long and do you lose customers at every stage? Are your call centers manned when your customers call? Are your customers’ calls getting answered?

Monitoring these factors can help to identify ways to make big improvements in the end result of your paid search campaign. They can also give a distorted picture of how well your campaign is working. For this reason it is vital to have a measure to allow you to judge how well the campaign is doing the job of driving relevant and qualified users to your site. There are many ways this can be achieved and can range from a product view, to a quote or a range of other on site actions being undertaken.

If your paid search campaign works well against these metrics, but does not deliver sales, then you many need to look beyond the immediate paid search campaign to find a solution.