A lot of people consider ROI the golden metric of search advertising. Put simply, ROI is the net profit of all advertising sales attributable to a campaign divided by the dollars invested in that campaign minus one. Positive is good. Negative is bad. Etc.

That's often a good perspective to adopt, but there are many problems with it. The key one I'm going to mention here is one I brought up in my last post. There's a big difference between getting people in the door and converting them.

Advertising is effective if it gets people in the door. Period.

With that out of the way, the question focuses squarely on where it needs to be: Do you have what you need to convert them?

Conversion is the hard part

Conversion is hard because it depends on a few things, some of which are related to how the people became visitors to your site:

• Did your advertising draw in a segment ready to undertake the conversion you want them to?
• Is your conversion opportunity one that any segment values?
• Is your advertising landing page one that effectively communicates your value proposition to the segment arriving there.

The first question is like a siren song to most advertisers. It's easy to tweak ads, hard to change offerings and landing pages. Further, advertisers pay for the ad clicks, not the conversions, which tends to keep them focused on the ads.

However, studies show that redesigning, raw, untargeted landing pages for conversion can lead to over an order of magnitude improvement in conversion. That's where the real power lies. It's just harder to do.