Search engine marketing (SEM) is the art of conversion.  It is one thing to have a great product for sale and have traffic but its quite another thing to convert those visitors into cash.  SEM is probably the hardest part of operating an online business and one of the only parts of the business that you should never contract out unless you are paying top dollar to a real professional with a proven history.

I was talking to the Vice President of Marketing for Aramark Uniform company just the other day and they are getting upwards of 100 thousand unique visitors each and every month and converting about 0.001%.  Yes, you read that right.  Point, zero zero one percent.  For a Fortune 500 company with all the resources in the world at their disposal, that is absolutely horrible!  This is because they spend so much time focused on the core of the business (catalog) they have not taken the much needed steps to improve their search engine marketing techniques.  And of course, now I am onboard to help improve their tracking and conversions but that is not why you are here.  The point is, you can get as many visitors as you like but if they don't buy anything once you get them there, it does you no good and worse yet, it makes you no money.

There are many different things you can do to increase conversions but before you do, you need to learn how to track your visitors and that is why you need tracking software like Google Analytics.