Imagine you had the ability to drill down into your marketing efforts to the point where you can literally track a sale in real time at the keyword level! Let me repeat that…IN REAL TIME AT THE KEYWORD LEVEL!. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Wouldn’t that finally give advertisers real control over their marketing budgets?

Anyway. I am sure that most of you “die-hards” who would actually be reading my post, have immediately called me on the sarcastic overtones of my paragraph above. Real time ROI metrics at the keyword level are much more than the daydreams of a broke advertiser looking for someone to tell him how many sales have resulted from his 20k a month billboard hanging over the highway for the last six months. In fact, real time ROI metrics are the basic foundation of anyone who dares call himself an internet marketer in today’s landscape of overblown marketing egos and paper champion companies with no true idea of innovation.

The problem, however, is that the power to tie one’s marketing so closely to one’s ROI has created an expectation level as big and bloated as the U.S. government after eight years in the hands of the Democrats. Advertisers want results yesterday, and not just any results, they want them within the guidelines of a CPA specific ROI metric that better be trending toward explosive growth at lower costs, and oh ya, it better happen in ten days or you have failed! Branding, lifetime value, sales deeper down the funnel, these are all nice, but they mean shit if that CPA target of $20.00 is coming in at $20.03.

What does it all mean? It means the “ROI Revolution” has created the largest imaginable pain in the ass for marketers. It means that as marketers your job is infinitely more difficult because now you can actually be held to something concrete. It means that when an advertiser screams and yells obscenities at you for last month’s performance, they actually have what they see as the proof of your failure to rub in your face.

But I sympathize for you, the marketer, because alas, I am one. All too well I understand the trials and tribulations of your valiant attempts in a world mired by Google quality score updates and garbitrage affiliates in search of a quick buck. And all too well I have come to learn that five years from now, when CPC’s are averging $2.00 and several new Fortune 500’s have built their empires on the back of search branding that they didn’t even know they were doing, you will be hailed as a hero, even though you couldn’t keep that CPA under 20 bucks.

Peace

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 30th, 2006 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, search-engine marketing, affiliate marketing, internet marketing, marketing, fringe marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.