To evaluate the effectiveness of Pay Per Click campaigns, most marketers track conversions, those being some type of action on the advertiser's website. Typically this refers to a submission of a web enquiry form, or an online sale made.
Blackglass - Tracking Digital Effectiveness Through the Sales Process
1. blackglass tracking digital effectiveness
By Rob Donkersloot
To evaluate the effectiveness of Pay Per Click campaigns, most marketers track conversions,
those being some type of action on the advertiser's website. Typically this refers to a submission
of a web enquiry form, or an online sale made.
Tracking these types of conversions is reasonably easy – it's just a matter of setting up the goals
in the analytics and PPC accounts, and adding the correct tracking to the website. Typically that
tracking is on the thank you page a user sees after completing their transaction.
The thing is, not all conversions are equal!
Some conversions are far more valuable to a business than others. With e-commerce sites,
where the purchase is made on the website, tracking the value of a sale generated by a paid click
can be achieved reasonably simply through Google Analytics.
For other sales processes, where the final transaction takes place offline, this can be far more
problematic. In instances like these, the conversion that has been set in Analytics and / or
Adwords is usually an action that records the first contact, typically a form submission requesting
information, a document download, or a sales appointment.
In a scenario like that described above, it is imperative the internal sales process is mapped
against the PPC website conversion data. If this is set up correctly in the organisation's CRM,or in
a bespoke sales tracking system, data such as whether a web enquiries led to a sales
appointments, whether that sales appointment led to a purchase, and the value of that purchase
can all be used to review and optimize a PPC account's performance.
We have seen instances where, in terms of enquiry conversions, an Adwords campaign may be
achieving terrific results, but from a sales perspective, that campaign may not be performing well
at all, and that other campaigns where enquiry conversions have been much lower, sales
performance has been far more successful.
Once the correct tracking mechanisms have been put in place both within the PPC platform (such
as Adwords) and the internal business systems (such as a CRM), far more intelligent insights can
be gleaned to make meaningful PPC optimisation decisions.
If you are not able to track the cost per lead, cost per sales appointment, and cost per sale of your
PPC campaign at a very minimum, you could find your PPC efforts are not achieving the full
potential of your online marketing spend.
If you would like to know more regarding integrating PPC conversion data with internal business
systems and improving you online marketing performance, contact Blackglass. Visit them at
