Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Where you see the detail, you can drill into the tree shown in Figure 11.7. this is
not all the detailed reporting you can do with paid search, but merely an indication of
what you can do to make your reporting more useful.
Optimizing Paid Search for an E-commerce Site
as you have noticed throughout this topic, i have often used e-commerce as an example
foundation, simply because it is very quick and easy to understand. e-commerce has
clear conversion points, and most of the time, these are sales conversion points. in
addition, a conversion point is assigned a value, the actual revenue, and perhaps even
a true profit.
therefore, most of this topic provides input for paid search optimization for an
e-commerce site. you might also be able to achieve a large part of your e-commerce
optimization with your bid management software, simply because the optimization
process is so well defined. if that's not entirely the case, you can use your web analytics
package as your primary optimization tool. For the most part, this strategy does not
seem particularly challenging—and it's more of a reporting issue than an analysis issue.
On the surface, this strategy may look fairly easy, but it is not a trivial task. you
have to choose optimizing goals, and this is probably the most important task in any
campaign optimization process. if you are not optimizing toward the right goal, you
probably won't be successful. even worse, you may end up “de-optimizing” your
campaigns.
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Note:
Remember, you are likely to worsen your campaigns if you optimize toward the wrong goal!
here are some possible optimization goals for an e-commerce site:
c
•
tr
•
V
isit-to-Sales conversion
•
V
isitor-to-Sales conversion
•
r
evenue per Visit
•
r
evenue per Visitor
•
P
rofit per Visitor
•
if
ifetime Value of the Visitor
looking at this list, you should immediately ask yourself which of these optimi-
zation goals you are using. you cannot use more than one optimization metric for one
campaign.
Just identifying which optimization metric to use is enough to justify the time
spent reading this topic. any optimization done on the ctr alone is prone to instant
“mis-optimization.” the reason is, if clicks are truly what you are going for, an ad
