We have starting programming our online store to track referrals from PPC. At what point do you decide if your PPC was effective? What I mean is a customer clicks the PPC ad and doesn't buy during this visit. Does this mean that there is no return on this click? But if they come back in a couple days and purchase should this be recorded for this PPC campaign? How long after the initial PPC click should a purchase show as a positive for the PPC campaign? Any thoughts? Thanks
Well, I think that time in this context doesn't matter here. It's necessary to compare all clicks for a certain period of time and all subsequent positive actions. Therefore, one will see how things stand, i.e. so - called conversion rate. Consequently, what's more important is to analyse why visitors click, but never show any positive action at all.
Are you tracking point of sale only? Are you doing it in-house or are you using a third party tracking system? For my clients, when a user passes through my tracking system, I currently set a cookie. If that same user comes back within the time frame of the cookie (most often 14 or 30 days) and makes a purchase, that purchase goes against the original click. If they come through on a new PPC click, the cookie gets overwritten and it goes against the new click. If they come back past the time frame of the cookie, it doesn't get attributed to the PPC click. As for effectiveness of your PPC campaign, that depends on many factors: Amount of Sale Margin Cost per Click New Customer Value (downstream) Simple Example: Keyword "dvd player" .25 a click 1% conversion rate 100 clicks = $25 in spend = 1 sale of a $100 dvd player Your cost for the DVD player was was $50 Your PPC cost to make the sale was $25 You realized $25 in net revenue from the sale This simple example doesn't take into consideration the other overhead costs of running your business however.... Also, if that person was a new customer it might be a more 'valuable' sale, as that new customer might come back later and make another purchase.
I do count any clicks coming from the PPC but knowing that an order was placed from that PPC is the difficult part. At what point do you say the PPC was effective? If they order within 30 minutes of the click? Or should it be 7 days or within 30 days? thoughts?
GuyfromChicago, thanks for the info, I was thinking 15 days would work for me. Beyond that, I don't think the click worked good enough to warrant the cost of the click.
I worked for a company that was trying to figure out the "Lifetime" value of a click--data limitations in that case meant "Lifetime" was only between 3-6 months, but when we got some data, it allowed us to increase several bids considerably, because we knew that over the lifetime of the clicks we got from those words, we would end up making money. Of course, the CEO didn't understand the concept, and made us scale back when he saw the increase in the advertising budget...but we tried. I think our cookies were set similar to iShopHQ's, but I don't think we ever purposely expired the cookie. Every once in a while we would get orders coming through for programs/words we had cancelled a couple months earlier. Toonces51