SEM meeting expectations is not good enough.

There are times when you make a connection between two things that are entirely not connected. That happened to me today on the way to the IAB Mixx conference in NY.

As I was walking down the isle on the plane, I saw the lady in the seat behind mine reach around and drop an empty water bottle on my seat. As I approached the row, I picked up the water bottle and, as politely as I could muster, asked “is this yours?” To which she replied “no.” And, you know, she was most likely telling the truth. It was probably left there by the prior passenger. But instead of just taking care of it herself, she dropped it on me.

Now I just shrugged, put the empty bottle between my bags on the floor in front of me and then threw it out when the attendants picked up trash. In other words, I just took care of it.

Then it struck me… this was the same mind set that I am seeing too often in SEM. Here is how it relates.

We have a very focused scope in our relationships with our clients. A scope in which search is a part, but not the whole. But, because of the way our team handles our core efforts in search, we very frequently have our clients ask us if we can handle their SEM in other areas; areas being handled by traditional SEM agencies. We have always approached these requests with great caution, a likely result of building our programs by putting our own money at risk, no the clients.

When we agree to take a look at it, what I frequently see is SEM from several years back. Somewhere, accountability for IMPROVING performance, not just meeting client expectations, got lost. It used to be easy to impress people outside of search, because they were so accustom to off-line metrics. SEM always looked good. But the improvements stopped there. And, if the client changed SEM agencies, the core problems persisted. While improvements were being gained in other marketing efforts, SEM remained stagnant. Each agency simply passed the empty bottle, the trash, on to the next.

This past year, for the first time at SMX, I heard a number of key SEM agencies talk about real improvement (they’ve been doing it, just not talking about it so much). Impact on sales trumped clicks or CTR. Cost per sale was more important than cost per click. Tracking performance to the sales has finally come out of the closet. This is great for those who embrace it. It may mean lower ad spend, and then lower compensation for SEMs. But, it is the right thing to do.

If the SEMs leave the trash around too long, the client will smell it and look for someone to clean it up. SEMs can not wait. If the clients ask if the SEM will track to the sale, then the SEM was derelict in evangelizing the better metric. Get there before the client, educate the client, even develop a proxy for cost per sale that can be phased out as the real metric is technically developed.

Good SEMs are there. But too many appear to be lagging. This is not good for them, or the industry.

Okay, Bears game is coming on, I gotta go.