Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Figure 11.10
Visit-to-sales conversion rate on a search listings level
does this mean that all the other keywords are worthless and we should put
all our money on those few, very high visit-to-sales conversion keywords? i think that
is unlikely. What we are seeing here is that companion keywords are used as part of
the visitors' (not visits) navigation and search for what they are going to buy. again,
if we removed all the nonconverting keywords without any further analysis and just
focused on this visit-to-sales conversion, we would again end up “mis-optimizing”
our campaign.
however, if we move on to the Visitor-to-Sales conversion metric, we might be
able to fix some of the flaws. if we optimize the overall campaign toward a better vis-
itor-to-sales conversion rate, we might be doing some good. the challenge with using
this metric is that we have to accept that yahoo! Web analytics is not a true visitor-
based system. i know yahoo! is moving into this, but that's not the case as of this writ-
ing. this means you have to do a bit of hacking to use this metric.
another problem is campaign attribution. When can we peg yahoo! Pcc as the
owner of a conversion? Furthermore, by using this metric we do not necessarily take
care of the optimization problem, and we might be driving low-value shopping carts,
where value is defined as anything from revenue to profits.
if you look at Figure 11.11, you will notice that we define and optimize toward
success on sales varying from approximately $4 to $143.
