Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
When you have few direct or indirect conversions to measure the impact of your
paid search program, you should use conversion proxies. you can correlate various
actions on the site, such as checkout page view, page views, document group views,
downloads, numbered actions, or time on site.
choosing the conversion proxy is not something you should look upon lightly.
your first task is to make sure that the proxy is not connected to your paid search
program—connected in such a way that you could move the proxy based on paid
search attributes alone.
imagine your content site is funded through sponsorships. you choose to use
whitepaper downloads as a proxy for success, because you only have three or four
sponsorship sales a month. however, if one of your paid search campaigns is directly
related to whitepaper downloads, this particular campaign will look overly success-
ful, and your budget will steer toward this one, when that is probably not the best
thing to do.
When the first data comes in, it's your task to judge whether the proxy is influ-
enced so that it favors certain campaigns. if that's the case, you can still use it; you
might just have to exclude it as a proxy for those particular campaigns.
let's move on to another type, the lead-generation site. you might judge this to
be a pure sale, but you should take a couple of points into consideration.
in our discussion of e-commerce, we explored the problem of assigning all sales
the same value. the same goes with leads: you cannot apply the same value to all
leads. When you sign up for webinars or other marketing subjects online, some sites
ask questions about budget, time to buy, country, or other information. these are all
qualifying elements that can be used to value the lead and determine the way you con-
duct your paid search campaigns. if you do not qualify your leads and just value them
all the same, you are likely to replace well-qualified traffic with less-qualified traffic.
this is an evitable result, because your competitors will figure out which keywords
generate high-value leads that are likely to convert and at a much higher end value. you
are left with the leftovers from your competitors. i am sure you do not want that.
adding to this complexity is the fact that most sites provide the customer with
an opportunity to connect over the phone; perhaps the phone might even be a primary
lead-generation channel. this is easy if you value your phone leads the same as the
online leads, as you can then use online leads as a proxy for phone leads. if you do not
value these leads the same, you have a separate set of tasks you should look into. One
of them is the potential of using unique 800 numbers, but this is a separate matter i
suggest you investigate on your own if you are in this situation.
moving along to another scenario, suppose you run a site where your primary
revenue source is advertising. you could optimize toward goals like:
P
298
•
age Views per Visit
a
•
dvertising revenue per Visit (multiply your current cPm value with your num-
ber of page views)
