Conversion tracking is all too often overlooked when it comes to planning a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy for internet marketing.

So says David Szetela, of Search Engine Watch, who warns any "newbie" search engine marketing company not to fall into the trap of concentrating on impressions, clicks, advert position and click-through rates (CTR).

While these metrics can be useful for online marketing services to determine if traffic is increasing to a website, they offer no help whatsoever when it comes down to the nitty-gritty - discovering how well a campaign is driving leads and sales.

"Tracking and reporting on conversion data and fine-tuning a PPC campaign's performance based on that, sets PPC advertising apart from other advertising channels that have no such built-in abilities," he said.

Impression analysis should be left to finding out how often an advert is appearing while click counting and CTR is best for finding out whether an advert is matching the terms of a user's search.

So should an internet marketing campaign focus on conversion rates first and foremost, at the expense of other metrics?

Online Marketing specialists Business Feet help create value from business websites