This is a term I’ve heard a lot lately. There’s a misconception that if an agency is handling your Internet CPL campaigns, that it’s a conflict of interest for them to handle your web marketing campaigns (SEO, PPCs to their web site, etc.). I’d like to put that misconception to rest.

The first thing to understand is that interactive marketing is completely different from web marketing. One is active advertising that goes out and gets leads on a cost-per-lead basis. Web site marketing is passive advertising that helps people who are looking for you, find you. These services are often budget- or fee-based.

Not only are they targeting different Internet populations, but they also find their targets in totally different manners. Interactive marketing focuses on volume, and therefore it and its affiliates target broad search terms like “career training” and “schools in Colorado.” Web marketing focuses on a smaller, niche set of searchers who know what they’re looking for. So web marketers will target search terms like “massage therapy training” and “medical classes in Michigan.”

If you type “career training” into a search engine, the results you get will be entirely different from what you get if you search for “medical classes in Michigan.” There can be no conflict when these two forms of interactive advertising don’t draw from the same group of search results.

The fact of the matter is, if you’re using one and not the other, you’re missing out on a piece of the interactive pie. The secret is to use both. And if the same agency handles both sides of your interactive campaign, it can even be beneficial.