Which marketing campaign gets the credit?

(or the limitations of conversion tracking)

By Rod Jacka

Does your company advertise in more than one place? I am guessing that it does, most do.

For instance your company might run a Google AdWords campaign to get search traffic, rank well on some keywords naturally, run banners on other websites, have an email subscriber campaign, place print based advertising and more.

Measuring the real impact of multiple campaigns in generating sales or leads can be difficult particularly for longer sales cycles.

Tracking which advertising campaigns convert is definitely a good idea. However as most tools (e.g. Google Analytics) report conversion based on the last campaign that the user responded to, just analysing conversion has limited value.

A typical case may look like this:

1. A prospective customer may see your AdWords ad when researching their purchasing needs in Google.
2. They then visit your website see a promotional tile on the website directing them to a special offer.
3. They then add the page to their favourites list and continue their research on other websites.
4. They then research other websites for similar products or services and discuss the shortlist with their team (or family).
5. They go to Google and search for your company by name.
6. They then complete your enquiry form or purchase online.

As most web analytics tools will credit the last advertising campaign or referral with the conversion, in our example the search for the company name in Google gets the credit.

This is a gross simplification of a more complex process and we risk making poor decisions if we act on this data based purely on the conversion rate. In reality the truth is often not so simple and the enquiry may never have occurred without the visitor having responded to the earlier campaigns.

Tracking your conversion rate is a good metric but you should only use this as one element in assessing the effectiveness of an advertising campaign.

If we use the data to change our advertising to focus more on those campaigns where enquiries were made, we risk loosing sales in the long term. The reason for this is that fewer visitors are exposed to the advertising during the early part of their purchasing process and may never receive the appropriate messages. This means less visitors will reach the later stages and this may result in a gradual decrease in sales as there are less brand aware visitors.

The classic Attention, Interest, Decision, Action model is a good method to plan and assess the impact of your marketing where your sales cycle is longer than a single visitor session. Conversion on its own focuses only on the "Action" part of the model and not on the first three. For these we need other metrics as there are fewer sales at this stage.

Selecting Appropriate Key Performance Indicators for Single Campaigns

Appropriate metrics for the earlier purchasing stages include looking for high levels of good interest indicators and low levels of disinterest indicators. It is important that you track these at the campaign level and use the site level as a benchmark to assess the relative position of the campaign.

Good interest indicators are:

• Pages per visitor & time on site for visitors from the campaign are equal or better than the overall site average and other campaigns.
• Lower bounce rates.
• Key web pages viewed by visitors from the campaign. E.g. a view of your company contact page would rank higher than a view of your home page. The WebTrends Score feature can assist you to measure this or similar functions can be done in other applications such as Google Analytics and others.

Disinterest indicators are:

• High bounce rates
• Low pages per visitor and time on site

The first thing to consider is setting your key performance indicators i.e. how your website contributes to your sales process. If most of your sales close on the phone after the customer has researched their options online then views of your product or services details followed by views of your contact page rate highly whereas bounces on your home page do not.

Naturally how you apply this will depend entirely on your business model and where your product and service fits in to the purchasing decision cycle. E.g. lowest price or convenient shipping on commonly available goods vs. considered high value purchase.

Increasingly some vendors are now providing tools that can track multiple campaign responses and then attribute all of the campaigns to which a visitor responded to towards the conversion.

Tagging Your Campaigns

I can't stress it enough; you absolutely must ensure that you track as many of your advertising campaigns as possible. This usually means that the links used in the campaign is assigned a tracking code and these must be used to successfully measure the effectiveness of the advertisements.

Failing to track your campaigns correctly will result in missing data and worse still poor decision making. For help in tagging your campaigns please contact us or come to one of our various web analytics courses.

Tracking Conversion across Multiple Campaigns

A more advanced approach is to track the effectiveness of your campaigns across multiple advertising campaigns. It is important to recognise that multiple campaign attribution can work well for sales cycles that are between a few days to a month. The longer the sales cycle, the greater the risk of data inaccuracy from deleted cookies and the harder the analysis.

High End Vendors

There are two tools that I am aware of that provide multiple credit for campaign conversion. These are Omniture and Coremetrics. If you know of others please email me to let me know and I will add them to this list.

These tools provide a method to capture and report on all campaigns that a visitor had previously responded to in the past and will attribute each campaign with the conversion.

DIY Using Cookies

Another approach is to not use your web analytics tool at all and use cookies to store the information and insert this into your customer relationship management system. If you set multiple cookies, e.g. c1, c2, etc. If these are stored with the customer record in your sales or customer relationship management system, you can then report on this data can on using the CRM, Excel or other reporting tools.

This approach is the most flexible; however it does require the most work as it may require substantial modifications to the website to use these tracking cookies and to store these in the forms or shopping cart application on the website. It may also require substantial modifications to the CRM or sales management system.

Bend your Existing Tool.

You can modify both Google Analytics and Urchin to track multiple campaigns. Both products store the campaign data in an easily accessible cookie and using this you can track more than one campaign.

A typical useful case is to measure both the original campaign that brought the visitor to the website plus any on-site advertising offers and the last campaign that the visitor responded to.

A working version of this is available to our customers and premium subscribers on request.

Panalysis are experts in helping you to work out how to track your campaigns. For further details on this and related issues, please contact us.