One of the most dangerous trends emerging is that B2B marketers, and their extended search- marketing resources, are regularly making bad decisions based on "solid analytics data."

Because as a consultant I work with various companies, I learn certain lessons much more quickly than, say, someone who is working only within his or her company and is therefore not privy to the same variety of information and experiences.

And I'm finding that all too often marketers are deciding to spend either more or less money based solely on the conversion rate of how a certain search phrase, ad creative, or banner ad performs: in other words, the percentage of people who visited the site and requested a whitepaper, a demo, etc.

While conversion rate, in the context of an analytics report, is one way to measure the effectiveness a search phrase, it can be extremely misleading.

For an example, let's take two search phrases from the same campaign: "Green IT" vs. "Systems Management."

You can see in the following screenshot that...

  • "Systems Management" delivered 66 visitors, and 1.52% of them converted to a whitepaper.
  • "Green IT" delivered 47 visitors, and 17.02% converted to a whitepaper.

The "Green IT" phrase is the hands down winner, right? Well, maybe not!

No one could blame the marketer running this search campaign for immediately pausing "Systems Management" and rerouting those dollars to buy more "Green IT" traffic. Doing so certainly would fall within the realm and responsibility of a good search-engine marketer—if this were all the data available. But you know better...

By now it's become common for most marketing departments to focus not just on the quantity of conversions but also on the quality of those conversions. A good Internet marketing system or analytics package like Google Analytics will tie the Web lead back to a specific search term in the pay-per-click campaign. This qualitative feedback helps search marketers make wiser decisions.

Surprisingly, however, one of the easiest pieces of data to capture that helps provide an even better picture of actual search-term value is often overlooked and rarely mentioned. I'm referring to the organizations themselves that arrived to the Web site but didn't convert. Or, in plain English: "Merck (for example) came to our site for the term 'Technology Management' and didn't fill out any forms, but we still know they were here!"

Refer to the screenshot above again and note the 14 visitors for "Technology Management" none of which converted. Is this phrase a stinker? Should we pause it? Not if Merck is on your wish list of companies! In fact, this phrase may be 10 times more valuable than all of those "Green IT" so-called conversions combined.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Todd Miechiels is a B2B Internet marketing consultant who specializes in search engine marketing and Web site visitor conversion. Reach him via www.miechiels.com.