I attended what turned out to be one of my favorite sessions at Search Engine Strategies, San Jose recently called “Why does search get all the credit”  Bill Hunt who was moderating started the session by saying that that major brands are still only spending a small percentage of overall ad dollars on search as little as 7.6%.  You can read more here.  This is very disheartening and its hard to figure out why the major brands are still not moving more budget to search given the high value of search how easy it is to measure success and ROI.  Measurability was discussed in detail and some very interesting points were made.  Search often gets all the credit  as its the last house on the block.  However, it is essential to track the actions through the cycle to ensure budget is being allocated correctly.

There is still friction between traditional marketers and online and the siloing of departments causes many problems in measuring the succes of campaigs through multiple channels.  Bill talked about double counting of sales and in one instance search was not getting any credit for leads as the leads where being allocated to the individual sales rep in the CRM and the original source (search) was completely lost. 

The key messages I got from the session were:

1. Ensure your tracking is set up correctly, 8 out of 10 analytics are deployed incorrectly.
2. Create and attribution model.  Measure succes at the different touch points, for example if there is a huge spike in traffic after a T.V. ad then that credit should be shared with the T.V. campaign. 
3. What will you measure, pre-metrics, impressions clicks cpc, post metrics, orders, sales, customer lifetime value.
4. Define your goals what is the end game, although many other channels push the visitor to search ensure that everybody is on the same page about how they got there.
5. How they get there is important but what they do while they are there is the bottom line.  Did they buy, did they go away in ten seconds.  Anyone can take credit for a 5% click thru rate the real pro can reduce a 95% exit rate.
6. Looks for tools or indicators that you have in other media to help indicate impact and success.  IBM has introduced the word green into some of their ads  and it has created great success.
7. Standardize tracking and marketing apps on one system.
8. Measure all views 1st last and shared.  Create a baseline using last, did they come from a press release, a site with a lot of banners. 
9. Do not overwrite the metrics and objectives track seperately, 1) Aquire visitors, 2) Conversion, 3) Remarket
10. Bring the stats to the budget conversations they tend to take the emotion out of the decisions

There still appears to be a long way to go to make the traditional marketers believers in search however, progress is being made and there is more awareness amongst the C-Level than ever.