Seeing the Light on Conversions

Getting the most out of your website? As a B2B marketer in the IT world, you likely have a key objective for your site: generating leads and moving prospects to your offline sales department. While most online marketers live and breathe their conversion rates, this approach, according to a post by Todd Miechiels on the Search Engine Land blog, might be missing the forest for the trees.

Miechiels stresses not getting overly focused on conversions. Instead, he says, consider these simple questions:

• How many legitimate companies have been steered to your website this month as a result of search engine marketing?
• Which search engine or referring site did they come from?
• Which search phrase brought them?

"If you are in a competitive B2B space, it's not uncommon to see lackluster conversion rates for things like demos and whitepapers," explains Miechiels. "Let's be generous and say you are getting a 30% conversion rate for paid search. ... That equates to having no intelligence whatsoever on 70 out of every 100 people that you are already paying for."

For example, were any of the visitors companies that your sales team is already pursuing? "Even more importantly," Miechiels says, "you may find that 80% of the high-quality organizations are coming as a result of just 20% of your search marketing spend."

That's important feedback you can take to the bank.

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