As an internet marketing consultant, I have worked with a number of clients to improve their search engine rankings and increase the traffic to their websites.
I have also run many successful pay per click advertising programs for my clients.
With both types of advertising, obviously where the client is listed in the search results is critical to success.
Thus, early in my career, I spent quite a bit of time on analysis and reporting of the search engine rankings by key word and the increase in traffic achieved from our efforts.

One day, I got a rude awakening when the Marketing Director for one of my clients called and cancelled their marketing contract despite the success I felt we were achieving for them.

I asked why they canceling and the response was:
“I don’t care how much traffic we get to our website. I don’t care where we are ranked with the search engines. I just care about increasing my sales. I have contacted most of our branch locations and asked if they were receiving leads from the internet. Their response was no.”

This client was not an eCommerce business so there were not identifiable sales coming from a shopping cart. We were making the client’s phone ring with new customers.
However, the problem was that most businesses do not recognize an internet lead as being such. They just know that the phone rang or that someone new showed up in their store and made a purchase.

This is when we made a significant adjustment in our approach.
We still report on things such as traffic and rankings, but what we constantly focus on now is how much business our client is getting from the effort.
We do everything we can to document that new clients are being acquired as a result of what we do.
This can be done with web analytics as well as other tools such as tracking phone numbers.
We also emphasize with our clients the life time value of a customer.
How many times does the average client make repeat purchases? In the case cited above, we were able to convince the client to continue with the marketing contract and with a better focus on documenting their internet sales, they eventually quadrupled their internet marketing budget.

Written by J. Burns Smith Jr. – WSI Star Web Solutions