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Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.

Recently, I attended MozCon, a search conference, hosted by Moz. Moz provides search marketing tools that make SEO, inbound marketing, link building, and content marketing easy. This company is pretty well-known in the search community.

Paid search lessons

One of the speakers was Amy Hebdon, who specializes in paid search at Paid Search Magic.  So, what do you think when the term, paid search, comes to your mind? When I think of paid search, I think of the following:

  • Optimizing a long list of keywords and phrases that I need to bid on or purchase
  • Numbers of impressions I need to accomplish
  • Lowering CPCs (cost per clicks)
  • Trying to rank number 1 on Google

What I liked about Amy’s presentation is that she was looking at paid search in a very holistic way. She talked about the purpose of the paid search. It’s not about ranking number 1 or hitting a goal of inbound traffic or impressions. At the end of the day, paid search is about putting your best offer in front of your target customers when they’re most ready to take action. So, the key here is your offer. Rule number 1, if you want to do paid search, you need to have a compelling offer. Once you have that, you need to present your offer in an easy-to-follow landing page to allow your visitors to take action quickly.

What she was looking at was the conversion rate from paid search to a landing page, not CPC nor paid ranking. These are still important, but she made an effort to track conversions. She tried to tie paid search’s contribution to an offer on the landing page, in a way. She tries to relate paid search to revenue.

How to track paid search conversion

The only way to track paid search conversions is for clients to have a process. In order to have a tracking process, the clients need to break down the silos and work with other team members within the company. For instance, the client needs to work with webmasters, copywriters and product owners among others to optimized as needed and track the engagements from paid search to the landing page.

She said that paid search is no longer about ranking and CPC, it’s about helping clients to break down the silos. Paid search works wonders if clients create a better online experience by crafting compelling offers, optimizing copywriting, and improving landing page experience.

Based on her case study, CPC (Cost per click) went up for her client, but the total revenue contribution from paid search increased significantly.

Her approach to paid search is less about paid keywords, but more about the overall experience from the minute the prospect clicks on an ad until they arrive at the landing page. She was looking customer experience as a whole. I love that.

Paid search and content marketing

It makes me think about content marketing. The content itself really doesn’t mean very much. Content has its value only when it’s part of marketing outreach.

Let’s use e-mail and content marketing as an example: email marketers can’t just worry about the look-and-feel of e-mail or add a bunch of content to the email. They need to think about what happens after people receive the email.  Does the landing page provide an experience consistent with the email? If the goal is to get the prospect to “request a demo”, do we make it easy for the audience to request a demo after the landing page clicks. Therefore, email shouldn’t be all about click through and open rates, but should be more about email’s revenue contribution from the “request a demo.”

It’s easy for all of us to measure what we do, but it’s so much harder to comprehend the overall marketing outreach holistically and measure our contributions to sales and revenue. It requires us to break down the silos and set up a tracking process and evaluating each touch point carefully.

If you want to talk about how to measure content marketing’s contribution to conversions, reach out and let’s have a chat. I’m more than happy to help.

Please, send me your marketing questions and thoughts here or via Twitter @pamdidner.

Be well. Until next time.

What can Pam Didner do for you?

Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.