If you were to ask the head of your organization’s marketing department what your company’s website lead generation rate was for 2008, would he or she be able to answer you? 

More than likely you’d get a roundabout response or maybe an “I’ll have to get back to you” answer.

Let’s face it. Most organizations don’t know how many of their site visitors are converting into leads or sales. Even with sophisticated analytics tools, making sense out of the data to track conversion rates is extremely difficult and time consuming, if not impossible to perform.

Thankfully in just a few weeks a new tool will be available to Sapha clients that can give then the conversion reporting that most marketers only dream about.

January 26, Sapha will launch a new conversion-centric application platform and reporting system, the Sapha Conversion Suite. This new conversion suite allows Sapha clients to see online lead generation results from our tools and their website’s overall conversion rates at a glance. Additionally, clients will be able to get granular reporting that can track the behavior of individual visitors and advertising campaigns from the time the visitor enters the site to when they leave.

Check back often as we’ll be discussing some of these features in more detail and how these reports will help you increase your overall website lead conversion rates so that you will know if you’re getting the most from your online marketing dollars.

Until our next update, go ask someone in your marketing department if they can tell you your organization’s website lead generation rate.

Last week, Microsoft added a cashback section to its Live Search web search engine. Their goal is to have more people use their search engine by offering them money back on purchases they make online throught this portal.

Two thoughts.

First, it’s interesting to learn how they incentivized retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Sears, Home Depot, J&R Electronics, and Office Depot to use their service. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

To get merchants to use the Live Search cashback service, Microsoft is using an alternative payment model called Cost Per Acquisition, in which the advertisers pay only when the ad results in a consumer purchase. Microsoft isn’t the only company to try that, but it differs from the standard model, which is based on the number of clicks on an ad.

Cost Per Acquisition (or CPA – also called Cost Per Action or Pay Per Action) has long been touted by direct response advertisers as the ultimate way to buy advertising since you don’t pay unless the visitor becomes a customer. Though CPA can be a good solution for some businesses, most advertising companies don’t have complete confidence in their client’s ability to close the sale and therefore don’t offer a CPA option.

It will be interesting to see how successful retailers find Microsoft’s CPA model and whether their success will pressure other search engines and other online purveyors of advertisements to offer similar advertising models to their clients. (Google’s Pay Per Action campaign is still in beta and is no longer taking new clients. You can read more about their Pay Per Action ad program here.)

Second, Microsoft’s new offering was touted as its latest attempt to grab market share from search engine leader Google. This is seems to be an odd way to go about it since all they are really offering is a product search engine. Live Search cashback seems to be more of rival to Google’s Product Search, not their web search engine. It may be helpful if you’re looking to buy a DVD player but not if you’re writing a report on George Washington.

For those who are old enough to remember, early search engines were somewhat of a crapshoot in terms of getting the quality search results. Google became the dominant search engine not by offering financial incentives for those who use its search engine, but by providing better search results than its competitors.

If Microsoft was really looking to cut into Google’s share of the search engine pie, a better way to do it would be to have their search engine produce better results and then convince web browsers that their search engine is better, and then enable a CPA strategy – in that order.   

When it comes to its search engine dominance, it appears Google has little to worry about from Microsoft’s latest offering.