On May 8, 2:03 pm, "Brian Carter" <bbcar...@gmail.com> wrote:

I wrote about it a bit the other day in a blog post (http://
www.seofaststart.com/blog/split-testing-adwords-youre-doing-it-wrong)
that I did for my readers who hate to watch video, but I've been
talking about "profit per SERP" since 2003.

I was trying to explain to a client why the keywords in their report
had very low search volume. They were hoping for more, and out of
frustration, I finally said, "we can't force people to search for ____
any more than they already do!"

Which stuck with me, because the one thing a search marketer can't
directly influence is the number of searches for a given keyword. The
number of searches is finite, so all we can do is try to earn more
profit, on average, from each search.

Because almost all of our members @ Stompernet are business owners,
whose income is directly tied to the total profit they generate, this
is an especially useful way for us to look at search campaigns... so
you could say that my ideas fit in nicely there.

This has relevance beyond paid search. One of my students worked with
me last month on a meta description rewrite for her site. She lost
about 10% of the clicks from the SERPs for her highest traffic
keyword, but gained more than 15% in sales, and even more in profit
because the average sale went up.

This was a simple matter of doing as I describe in the video - making
the "offer" (description) more compelling and effective for the "right
customer." She lost traffic, but increased her "profit per search" by
nearly 20%. With more work, she can probably bring that up even more.

It gets a little trickier in a publicly traded company, because "more
total profit" might be bad for their stock if the % of profit vs
revenues doesn't meet some dipstick analyst's projection. You can make
them more money than ever and still get fired.

For an agency, yes, this is more difficult. You've either got to sell
conversion & usability work right from the start, gain buy-in after
the fact, or just never work with anyone who isn't already good at it.

I've almost always worked on a performance basis, and tried to tie
compensation to the profits. The last 'flat monthly rate' deal I did
was with Brad Fallon (they guy we talked about in the video), and only
because he didn't choke on my outrageous price. Even though he paid
and didn't flinch, as it turns out I'd have been much happier with a %
of profits.

Performance based pay is a double-edged sword, but it does help
everyone focus on the real goal.

This is a tough issue. Without some kind of CRM integration, all you
can really get is cost per lead. Unfortunately, "cost per lead" is
about as useful a metric as "cost per click." It looks like it's
closer to the truth, but you're still not measuring the right thing...
and generating bad leads to hit a "cost per lead" number can have huge
ripple effects. Bad leads affect the performance of a sales team,
which affects their compensation, turnover (voluntary and otherwise),
and it can be worse than doing nothing.

A small company can just switch 800 numbers and email addresses when
the visitor is from Campaign X, and keep track. My 'small time'
friends doing lead gen do that - the red phone rings and it's from
Google. :D Beyond that... it's just one of many challenges in getting
from small to big. Salesforce is actually pretty good and not terribly
expensive. (We're using it and it's by no means perfect, but it does
beat every alternative we looked at). Maybe some middleware between
Salesforce & the other system, but it's problem I'm glad I don't have
to solve.

Thanks! SEOFS 2008 is coming in 7 days, and PPC Fast Start is June 1.