Praxis Communications, Inc.

CLICKTHROUGH TRAFFIC IS TERRIFIC! (BUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?)
Challenge:
Evaluating the effectiveness of an online campaign can be difficult. Sure, you’re getting thousands of clickthroughs from your AdWords Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign, or your directory, banner or e-mail promotions, but what happens to these site visitors after they’ve checked in? What do they do? Where do they go? What do they look at? It would be great to know more about them, wouldn’t it? It would be even better to get something of value from them while they’re there. But what?

Just how do you measure the return on investment for your Google SEM buy, anyway? If you’re not selling anything on your site, understanding ROI is even more difficult because traffic per se doesn’t translate to customers. In this case, you first need to determine what value you want from your site visitors before you can build a conversion objective into your strategy to compare with your investment.

Solution:
Sounds complicated, right? Well, Google has helped to make it a little easier. If you are running an AdWords campaign, Google gives you the code to record “conversions”, that is, folks who come to your site through their SEM keyword (or any other campaign), and who perform a pre-determined value action. Still, you need to figure out what constitutes that value action (conversion) before you set up the tracking code. With a Google campaign, you can actually measure the conversion effectiveness of single keywords in your program, an enormously powerful tool for tweaking your ongoing SEM buy for maximum effectiveness.

Taking the example of recording conversions on a non-e-commerce site, let’s say that a site registration is the predetermined value action. So, anyone who comes to your site from a paid campaign (i.e., Google AdWords), and registers (for whatever reason) is recorded as a conversion. Excellent! Now, Google’s dashboard will translate your conversions into an ROI (number of conversions divided by the cost of the campaign). However; to determine if the campaign is worth the investment, you still need to decide what each conversion is worth.

Once your Google conversion program is running, you can extend your tracking to virtually any other campaign, using additional code from Google. In this way, you can measure and evaluate ROI for e-mail promotions, other SEM campaigns (Yahoo, MSN, etc), banners, or even paid directories such as ThomasNet or DirectIndustry.

Getting it done:
  1. Make sure you have a viable Google AdWords SEM campaign running.
  2. Determine what will constitute a conversion action within your site.
  3. Determine the value of that conversion action.
  4. Set up the necessary additional pages to record the conversion (a “Thank You” page, for instance).
  5. Acquire the code from your Google AdWords account.
  6. Test and deploy the Google conversion tracking code.
  7. When satisfied that the Google code is working, download additional code and install in any other campaign you wish.
  8. If you know what results you want, but you’re still confused about how to implement it, call a consultant to help set up and manage your campaigns.

Is this an issue you need help with? Get our advice.


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