I just spoke with one of our biz dev people this morning about realistic PPC goals for a new prospect. Our conversation reminded me of Monday’s post where I talked about why visits are a bad success metric for Pay Per Click campaigns.

Because honestly, if visits are the #1 success metric a client obsesses over, we as the new vendor will actually look like we’re hurting their efforts rather than helping them.

Here’s why:

I’ve seen several clients with decent budgets blow through their monthly spend without optimizing their ads, keywords, or landing pages. They get tons of traffic, and that makes them happy. They know they could theoretically do better, but they’re not sure how.

Enter the Daniel (or Dragon, your choice). I’ll spend some time testing new ad copy, rearranging keywords into ad groups and campaigns that make sense, and adding negative keywords to weed out the times the ads appear for irrelevant searches, and as we progress, each ad impression will reach a more targeted audience and each click will be worth more – but it will also COST more.

Who Wants to Pay a Specialist to Drive LESS Traffic?

This means that while Client X, we’ll call them “ZZZebras” (don’t ask me why, just go with it), was previously driving 6,000 less targeted visitors to their site with PPC, I am now driving 3,500 more targeted visitors to their website. But do they care? Not if the only measurement they’ve used for success was traffic. With that mindset, more traffic = more success. Of course, with their old PPC campaign, half of their visitors might be college students doing research on the sleeping patters of zebras instead of the awesome child-safe equivalent of Tylenol PM or Nytol (which, for the sake of this discussion, is what ZZZebras sells).

Should ZZZebras be excited over the 3,000 PAID FOR visitors doing research on a completely different topic? Obviously not. Yet in reality, many are.

So when Daniel, Ankush, and the rest of the MarketNet crew come along and drive 1,500 fewer monthly visits, the client is sitting there tempted to wonder why they bothered to use a vendor. And the answer is simple. They bothered because they are now selling 30% more over the counter bottles than they were previously. Of course, they won’t actually know it’s due to PPC unless they’re monitoring PPC from click to purchase. If ZZZebras were only tracking to the point of site entry, they’d never know that less traffic meant more sales. And they’d miss out on all that giddy we-spent-our-money-wisely warm zebra fuzziness that should soon follow.

Not that zebras are particularly warm. Or fuzzy. Right.

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