The SEO Book posts a thoughtful article on the topic on “Mixing Organic SEO and Pay Per Click Marketing“.

The one thing I really value about a PPC campaign is the measurability. As your paying for every click-through, you can tie some pretty hard numbers together that will describe the effectiveness of your ad on attracting click-throughs, and then the effectiveness of your site in converting a visitor into a customer or at least an enquiry.

I tend to focus on service based businesses, doctors, lawyers, etc. and in those businesses it is the leads that matter, its the email enquiry or phone call that is generated when someone hits the site that is really valuable. It only takes one campaign to get an understanding of how the web site is performing at converting visitors into leads, and the great thing about that is it gives a solid argument for investment to try and improve the conversion rate of visitor into lead.

Most service based businesses couldn’t tell you if the several thousand dollars they put into their web site a year ago was a good investment or not. A web site shouldn’t be a “nice to have” or “we need one to seem legitimate”, it should be driving business, it is a marketing channel and it should be converting visitors into leads or customers.