August 20, 2004

For many of our clients, we run weekly or sometimes daily reports on all their online activity. Obviously, the more frequent, the more detailed and the more accurate your reports will be.

To convert, or not to convert, that is the issue
Online shopping and e-commerce constitutes a data analyst’s dream come true! Every marketing effort you make can literally be accounted for, from ad view, to ad click to product selection, and finally, to its conversion. Even if you’re using ROI tracking reports to carefully evaluate every individual paid listing you have, you should always remember that just because your visitors convert into buyers most times, it doesn’t mean they always will.

If you find that some campaigns are not as well performing, give them a bit more time to produce results. From experience, most ROI tracking solution I know don’t always account for such things as offline conversions or worse, deferred conversions.

Offline conversions are especially more important with e-tailors that have a physical store presence. For example, let’s say Wal-Mart would be running a four week paid listing promoting their new lawn furniture and poolside accessories. For online consumers that visited their site before going to the actual physical store, and unless they are using a coupon redemption program, there is no way of accurately predicting or measuring this kind of offline sales data.

A deferred conversion is identified as when a search engine user clicks on your paid listing and visits your site, but doesn’t buy right away.

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Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2004

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