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Conversion Tracking – Online and Offline!

By Shalom | July 1, 2007

One of my first SEM campaigns was for a lead generation website for home renovation contractors. The site focused on regional services and all my campaigns were geo-targeted. Conversion tracking was implemented through the PPC platforms and via Google Analytics. For my client the bottom line and the only thing that mattered was “Cost Per Conversion”. No daily budget, no bid scheduling and reporting could have eliminated except for three variables.

Total spend
Total number of conversions
Average cost per conversion

The business was successful as a lead generation website. A couple years later I began managing a similar campaign for a website focused on a different industry. Although for the most part the structure of the sites and their campaigns were very similar there was one major difference between the two businesses. The contractor lead generation site, was a marketing engine that resold leads for a “cost per lead” fee. The later, generated leads for its own sales team. Now two types of conversions had to be tracked:

Online conversion and offline conversions.

Its simple enough to install analytics and PPC conversion tracking. The basic is having ads direct visitors to a site that funnels them to a lead form. After submitting information via the web form visitors are taken to a “Thank You” page (where conversion tracking codes are installed). This process defines your online cost per conversion. Now, the real sales cycle begins. A process usually much longer and more difficult to track. Maybe your site has a built in CRM or back end or you integrate with a third party application like salesforce. Lets say that Joe Smith after completing the web form opens an account and one month later makes a purchase that results in revenue. How do you know what marketing campaign drove that sale. Did the “Joe Smith” lead originate from Adwords or YSM? Maybe it was an organic lead. Whether it was PPC or organic – it would be nice to know what keyword Mr Smith queried before the actual click through.

Most PPC management firms and professionals ignore offline conversion tracking – simply because there is no standard solution through the advertising platforms themselves. Its my opinion that ignoring the offline conversion is negligent, especially because there are many very simple solutions to bridging offline and online conversions.

An example of how important bridging online and offline conversions.Company X

Spends $36,000 per month on PPC

Targeting hundreds of relevant keywords

Online cost per conversion $20/ leads (approx.)

Offline the company converts 5/30 (conversion rate = 16.7%

This means that cost per offline conversion = $120

After tracking offline conversions back to keyword over a period of 100 days I discovered that only 4 broad match key phrases ever lead to any offline conversions. Knowing this I stopped targeting all other keywords except for the ones that ever resulted in leads that led to revenue (offline sales). After the first month marketing the companies sales volume derived from online marketing remained the same (not including its natural growth due to recurring sales. Its marketing costs were effectively reduced from $36, 000 to less than $4,000 per month without dropping a single point in sales. For years prior to my management Company X effectively burned hundreds of thousands of dollars simply because they never tracked and correlated offline conversions to their online marketing campaigns.

Don’t let this happen to you.

Topics: Analytics, Google Adwords, Google Analytics Setup, Internet Marketing, Marketing Analysis, Microsoft Adcenter, PPC and CPM Advertising, SEM, WebTov, Yahoo Search Marketing | No Comments »