Advertisers need to perform too

With the measurability that online publishing brings, advertisers are more on the hook than ever when it comes to performance. But I like this recent post from directory publishing guru Russell Perkins, who says:

Just as the search engines have to perform in order to get paid, advertisers, too, need to perform in order to generate sales. Unfortunately, this is anything but commonly accepted wisdom right now.

So true. This reminds me of an incident a few weeks ago where an advertiser asked if there's any proof that our online advertising can result in sales. Our answer was that geez, you have to do something yourself. We can't sell a machine for you. We can't even generate a lead for you. What we can do is produce a steady flow of qualified prospects. It's up to you to market to them to turn them into a lead, and then into a sale.

No question that advertisers want to know whether their hard-won marketing dollars are justified wherever they're spent. But it's not accurate to hold any single medium to such a direct level of accountability.

Say a prospect buys your product. Which marketing was responsible for that sale? Was it the 3 years of print branding that did it? The online banners? The white paper lead-gen ad? The conversation with the marketing manager at the last trade show in your booth? The phone calls placed by your sales rep? Or maybe the conversation he had with a peer at a recent conference? It all works together.

That said, we still encounter some advertisers who are obsessively focused on traffic to their Web sites. Says Perkins:

Traffic to a B2B Web site, whether organic or purchased, is no different than the advertising impressions generated by a print magazine. Frankly, patting oneself on the back for generating lots of Web site traffic is about the same as patting oneself on the back for running a magazine ad. Great, you did something. But it's what one does after one attracts attention that really matters, because that's what determines how many of these fleeting eyeballs will start the path down the long pipeline to becoming sales. It's as true online as it always was in print.

The emphasis shouldn't be on traffic, it should be on converting that traffic into prospects and then leads. And the ultimate responsibility for this lies with the advertiser.