Sales only come from leads not clicks
- Wednesday, 7 May 2008
From Bryn Morgan, marketing director, PDV NMA Letters page 10.4.08
Your News Analysis 'Majors move to confer value on every click' ( NMA 06.03.08 ) seems to of missed the main point of marketing evaluation: to monitor return on investment.
When someone clicks on a link, the brand doesn't get any money because nothing has been sold. Therefore measuring clicks even if done in a sophisticated way that tracks whether the click is the result of one type of marketing activity or several, is about as futile as counting the number of people who glance in a shop window as they pass by. Yet that click, even if accidental, can cost as much as £50.
Clicks aren't sales: they're not even sales leads. Unless there's a way in which the brand can get back to that individual to follow through with a sale, you're just counting unidentifiable faces in a crowd.
The solution is not in the hands of 'online giants', as you suggest. It's down to the individual marketer to use more measureable forms of internet promotion. While they concerntrate their budgets on the £2 - per thousand email broadcast or the pay per click system, they'll never be able to track marketing activity through to a specific sale.
When they start thinking in terms of price per sale rather than cost per thousnad names, ROI measurement will be easy. This is why exclusively generated sales leads give the marketing edge and deliver acurate ROI figures, allowing marketers to spend on the sources that deliver sales, not transitory site visits.
