I'm running an AdWords campaign for a client, where the objective, aside from conversions, is to measure incremental sales ie. If we weren't running an SEM campaign, would we have got these sales anyway?
I think as the search industry further develops & matures (in different stages around the world), this will become an increasingly common question. As large brands are now putting serious money into search, they want to understand what the incremental value of this added spend is.
So - in order to try & answer this question, I'm looking at things like organic rankings (how well do the rank for some key industry terms?), conversion latency times (how quickly do people convert after clicking?), as well as whatever Google Analytics can tell me. Also, we're turning SEM campaigns on/off over a period of months to test the differences.
I'm wondering if anyone else out there on the agency or client side has come across this question before, how they approached it etc? Anyone have some other ideas around measurement etc? Has anyone come across larger advertisers with strong brand names (banks, airlines, shopping sites etc) who are asking these questions?
