• Adotas, Wednesday, June 21, 2006 11 AM

Stamping a price on paid search, like corporate accounting, can be a very creative process. For successful search marketers, knowing how to measure sales cycles is one of THE keys for demonstrating ROI success. Neophyte search marketers lose by simply assuming that a paid search campaign should be measured after its completed. For a week-long campaign, you need to keep measuring conversions after one month or more, because it often takes many prospects that long to convert. This means setting a cookie for the click date and following it through to the conversion date. Sales cycles are vastly different for different products, and knowing these is key. If you know a given product generally takes five days to convert, you can withstand losses for the few days with the confidence that the sales cycle has yet to pan out. New SEMers might jump at spikes in keyword sales that yield no immediate conversions and then turn off or pause their campaigns, but sometimes this is the normal course of action. Once you know your sales cycles, you can deploy day and time parting if you know what time of day offers normally convert.

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