Recently I have come across a lot of conversations about “Click.” B2B marketers are talking to me about PPC and CPA; event marketers are talking about online-to-offline conversion. Every discussion is about finding an essential economic and operation model which can drive clicks to the marketing results.

Paul Dunay said in the B2B 2.0 Expo that all the individual metrics such as CPC, CPA, impression, unique users, were no longer relevant because after all only “Sales” that would count. Well, I think at least in the digital world, “Click” should always be the metric before any sales can be measured.

A while ago search guru and the author of the book “Search,” John Battelle had an interesting piece that brought up an observation about “Google wants to own the second click as well as the first click.” I find this metaphor inspiring. Obviously Google has the “first-click” market. All marketers are competing for the second click on the SERP.

Today even the event marketers, they want to drive online traffic to their offline events, or vice versa, they want to convert eyeballs of the offline campaign for online registration. Either way, the marketers want clicks.

Basically an event marketer needs 4 clicks for one registration.

1. The first click on the search engine button after punching in the keyword.
2. The second click on the organic result of the SERP or the sponsored link.
3. The third click on the registration button of the event’s landing page.
4. The fourth click on the submit button of the registration page.

You can cut short the number of clicks if your landing page is the registration page or your website has been widely publicized so people don’t need to go through a search engine to find you. But I have seen many event marketers don’t optimize the landing page or let the registration button buried under a complicated website navigation. As it turns out, the number of clicks to complete a registration become an infinity.

How much it costs for a click is another interesting topic. There are so many discussions on cost per action or cost per acquisition. CPA varies among different business sectors and verticals and highly depends on the definition of conversion. I had a case that resulted an initial ECPA at USD500 for 2 successful invoices, each worth half a million dollars.

A scientific way to determine a CPA rate for your own industry is to run a pilot campaign that can give you some senses about your own conversion rate (assuming the same contextual or behavioral relevancy regardless the ad format). Tweaking your conversion rate you will then result a CPA that works the best for you.

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