Carl returned to office after a tough day of negotiations. He still was not sure if crucial deal was on or off, but dinner would soon be waiting and he had just enough time left to check his emails and his phone messages.

He had twelve phone messages, every one of them urgent. Too late to call back right away; that would have to wait for morning.

His inbox held that familiar email report from his website monitoring service. He smiled. As usual, there were no error alerts. That's what he liked to see -- his website still performing well.

He looked carefully at report. All forms were functioning. The shopping cart, too. Password protection was functioning. At least he did not have to worry about his web site this evening.

There were still some download speed issues reported by the new Hong Kong monitoring station. He made a mental note to raise issue with his web host contact in morning.

Just as he was putting on his jacket to leave, his cell phone rang.

A few minutes later, he called his wife. "Hi Ruby. How's dinner doing?"

"Great, Carl. You'll be home soon?"

He had put together a sweet little landing site. He had 20 keyword groups running about 10,000 unique visitors a month. He was spending $5,000 per month on pay per click on sales of $6,000. He was collecting email addresses at a rate of 100/day through an opt-in form. He had placed his Google tracking data on confirmation page of his subscription form. He had great data he collected daily over past 4 months. He had calculated his visitor value based on commissions divided by clicks and was bidding accordingly. He was a dream client.

Could I help him?

I was drooling over this one. In this case I was 100% sure I could at least double his profits, and likely triple or quadruple. Why was I so sure?

1) He was tracking sign-ups, not conversions 2) He was selling 22 different items off of one landing page 3) He was calculating his visitor value incorrectly

The first thing I did was turn off his keyword groups one at a time. When I got to his top keyword group, one with highest conversion rate, we prepared for a massive drop in commissions. There was only a slight dip.

He was stunned. He had made a simple assumption – that there would be a correlation between signups and sales. That is, a keyword that produces twice as many signups would likewise produce twice as many sales. But that wasn’t true. We had seen vividly that there were keywords that produced lots of signups but few sales, and visa versa. He was bidding based on wrong data. His finely-tuned Ferrari of a website was, in fact, a peddler’s cart of clanking pots and pans strapped on with little thought to efficiency.

I had him write letters to each of his advertisers, requesting they place his Google tracking code on their Thank You page. That way he could track sales directly. (Important: Place code in an attachment; email programs can scramble code.) For a sample letter, click here.