July 24, 2008 on 12:02 pm
Filed Under:Web
Coule be a red herring, a ruse, a bait-and-switch, but I read an article that caught my eye for what basically amounts to the title above. As the rest of the article seemed to be more of a pimping of the company and possibly even they’re advertising scheme, I still liked the concept enough to write my thoughts on it.
Much the same as too much SEO work gets done with little attention paid to conversions, more focus in Pay-Per-Click is put on Impression/Click Through ratio rather than Click Throughs/Goal Pages conversion. Seemingly, the bottom line keeps getting forgotten:
Having your site work for you.
Whether that’s making you money through sales or making you money by driving customers to your shop, shouldn’t you be paying for people that are doing someting on your site other than clicking on it out of curiosity? You spent money on builiding your site and continue to spend money on it to market it, shouldn’t you be getting more than what you spent on it back in your pocket?
So what’s the best way to find out if this is happening?
Simple. Figure out how much you’ve spent vs. how much it’s earning you.
Yeah, I hear you, maybe not so simple. But it should be, and the people you’re paying to market your site should be helping you find out. If they’re not or can’t, sad as it seems it may not actually be an issue of them not wanting you to know if they’re proving their worth or not, it may actually be because they don’t even know how.
Something I’m working to push these days, as a business and as an individual in the industry, is transparency. Accountability goes along with this quite naturally, as does providing clear information and reporting, and both are part of an overall service that it seems so few offer.
So, here’s me telling you that you need to be telling your clients how worthwhile your efforts (and their budget) are clearly and effectively. If you happen to be my competition, then I hope you ignore this advice because it can only make your business stronger. If you’re a potential client, Welcome, I’m not going to hide anything from you.
Quite conversely, I’m going to tell you quite a lot that you didn’t know, and even some things that you didn’t know you didn’t know, know what I’m saying?