I've written time and time again about the need to get past things like rankings and traffic in order to look at what really matters in a search campaign. Namely...sales and profits. A new study released this morning shows that most businesses still don't get it.

Among the findings:

• A full 4 out of every 5 search engine marketers have the evaluation of their performance tied to some search engine marketing metric.
• 1 out of 2 search engine marketers are evaluated on website traffic volume and/or top search engine ranking.
• 4 out of 10 search engine marketers are evaluated on ROI or total sales generated by their search engine marketing efforts.
• Just 1 to 2 in 10 search engine marketers are evaluated on offline results generated by their search engine marketing efforts.

"I am taken aback by this finding," said iProspect President, Rob Murray. "We expected that business results would be the big factor in search marketer performance evaluation since this discipline has significant costs associated with it -- costs that organizations would ostensibly need to justify in order to continue investment in it. This is especially surprising given that the organizations participating in this survey have dedicated search marketing resources and budgets."

While I agree that it's a shame that companies still don't understand what they should track, I can't say that I'm "taken aback" or even slightly surprised by it. This is the same type of thing that I hear time and time again at conferences, by email, or while speaking with potential clients.

Until folks start to grasp the idea that conversions count and traffic really doesn't, most companies will fail to really see the full measure of results that they could be getting from their campaigns.

The white paper written as a result of the study is available online at the iProspect site: Search Marketer Performance Study.