After reading "Most Marketers Not Measuring Right SEM Results" on ClickZ, and "SEO Outperforms Paid Ads According to Reasearch" on The Hosting News, I couldn't help remembering all the times my reps and I tried to get our advertising accounts to track their leads to ROI. Even the accounts that wanted to do it found it very hard to be successful.
The reason was that with industrial B2B sales there were usually dealers, distributors, or manufacturer rep firms involved in the sale. These middlemen were hard to get feedback from even when given a "carrot" and a "stick" as motivation. Some middlemen even claimed credit for the sale, since after many months the buyer couldn't remember how the whole thing started.
As much as I respect this iProspect Study (even though it is "posturing"), and I agree with most of what they say, I wish they had divided the study into B2B and B2C. The reason is B2B usually has a much longer buying cycle. While B2C can have middlemen like wholesalers, the buying cycle usually is shorter. This makes it easier to get quality feedback. Web Analytics provides quality feedback for online sales and actions, but not for offline sales. That is why I am against SEO and SEM Consultants being compensated on a traditional "Pay-For-Performance" basis when there are offline sales involved.
So, besides separating B2B from B2C markets, the other constructive comment that I have involves how the "Differences in Cost Models" (on Page 5) describe SEO costs for advertisers. It says: "In the case of natural SEO, however, marketers typically pay a flat fee for an engagement." It then says "With every successive dollar generated, therefore, the SEO campaign incurs no additional cost (as a paid search campaign does), and so with every dollar produced, the ROI - by definition - increases."
Even if the year's contract, which included months of maintenance was up, the marketer should extend the maintenance of the SEO! Extended maintenance costs should reflect only the actual amount of work that is needed to tweak for algorithm changes, additional inbound links, etc.. But, SEO is NOT a "do it once, and it's done forever proposition! This is misleading, in my opinion. What do you think?
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