I think the paradox you referred to is something every PPC manager is dealing with. For me, the landing page optimization part is fun and although it’s not part of PPC management by definition, I still provide this service as part of the package. You are right when you said that this is leaving money on the table but I think that only when this topic will get more recognition you could more easily sell it to your clients as a different service than PPC.

My hope is that as the buzz of post-click optimization continues to grow, PPC and other online marketing providers will simply be able to add conversion rate optimization services to their product offering and clients will be savvy enough to understand the huge impact that CRO has on their ability to profitably utilize PPC, email, social media and other traffic harvesting channels.

It seems like enterprise-type companies are latching onto CRO, but it’s only just trickling down to the SMB, which is where the revolution really needs to take hold.

As for now, I am constantly feeding my clients suggestions for tweaking their landing pages and other web pages in a way that doesn’t suck up my time but still helps remove obvious conversion roadblocks.