Paid search, what you should be measuring but aren’t

Published by Ben | Filed under PPC, Events

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

Christine Churchill - KeyRelevance - Offline Conversion

When to measure offline conversions? Most appropriate for ‘high touch’ sales processes where phone & in-person close the deal (mortgages, b2b, etc)

Simple Offline Conversion Tracking Methods:

• Making assumptions based on sales
• Anecdotal data (ask salespeople to ask people how they learned about them)
• In-store surveys
• all of the above are imprecise

Intermediate

• Unique phone numbers, etc

Advanced

• customer tagging (cookies) & tie the cookie to cc data for offline purchase
• unique phone numbers
• pay per call
• keyword driven traffic: match unique phone number back to keyword phrases used in PPC

Rich Devine - ZAAZ

Only a small % of your visitors convert, and if you focus on them - you’re missing the other successful behavior that takes place on your site

Most marketers are probably under-valuing non-converting keywords, but if you start looking at “other” conversions on your site and successful visits (micro-conversion behavior), then you are able to assign a value to them.

Akin Arikan - Unica Corporation

Study showed correlation between online ads & search. The finding was that when running online ads in parallel with search and then turned them off - paid search ctr & conversion down, cost to maintain volume went up.

Takeaway - take off the blinders and look to how other channels are influencing your success.

Related Links & Coverage

SMX on Twitter
Search Engine Roundtable recap