When David and I wrote our first line of Clickable code in 2006, it was always our belief that our ability to help our customers succeed in search advertising would rely on collecting and analyzing the right data. That’s why I’m excited to announce our introduction this week of Clickable Conversion Tracking, a milestone in our product roadmap. It will greatly improve profitability of our customers’ search advertising campaigns and simplify the technical setup of this core best practice. Clickable Conversion Tracking is now in beta, and we’ll release it as a full feature within Clickable Pro in December. (See full press release.)
We’re extremely interested in your perspective. Are you using conversion tracking today? If not, what are the obstacles? If yes, what systems do you use? What do you like about them? What don’t you like? Have we hit on the right problems to solve for you? Please let us know, because your feedback is critical to our development.
Because of the significance of this feature, I’d like to share below an introduction to the practice of conversion tracking, as well as the profitability advantages. Then I’d like to share how Clickable Conversion Tracking works and can drive your success.
What is Conversion Tracking?
The task of a search engine is to deliver clicks to your Web site. Once a click has been delivered, we have to ensure that your Web site converts those clicks into revenues and profits.
The conversion of clicks to revenues and profits is based on your business model. You may use your clicks to drive a customer lead for your products and services. Or, you may use your clicks to drive a sale on your Web site. Or, you may use your clicks to drive pages views on your site. All of these are equally valid conversions – or successful outcomes – of your clicks.
The task of a conversion-tracking system is to accurately track each conversion, track its source, and track the cost of the source. This allows us to make a fundamental shift away from the cost-per-click metric that is used as a core metric by search engines to a cost-per-conversion metric, which is far more important to advertisers. We’ll examine why below.
Conversion Tracking Improves Profitability
The shift in strategy from cost-per-click to cost-per-conversion allows us to measure the true profitability of each keyword in our campaign. The core idea is that marketers should make advertising investment decisions based on how much profit or value a click delivers in the end – not the standalone price of a click, irrespective of outcome. Here’s an example:
Consider two possible keywords for an oral surgeon’s Web site that seeks consulting appointments for prospective oral surgery patients.
- The keyword “dentist” results in 100 clicks at $1.00 each. Since “dentist” is an overly broad keyword, only 1 in 100 clicks request an appointment with the doctor. In this case, the cost-per-conversion (aka cost-per-acquisition) is $100.
- On the other hand, the keyword “Oral Surgery” results in only 20 clicks at $5.00 each, but those 20 clicks result in 4 appointments. In this case, the cost-per-acquisition is $25.
Let’s compare how the two metrics result in different decisions that affect profitability.
- The cost-per-click is $1 for ‘dentist’ and $5 for ‘oral surgeon’. If conversion tracking is not set up on the campaign, we may be tempted to increase our spending on ‘dentist’ and reduce our spending on the ‘oral surgeon’.
- Let’s now view the same decision from a cost-per-acquisition perspective. The cost-per-acquisition is $100 for ‘dentist’ and $25 for ‘oral surgeon’. With conversion tracking enabled, we now have insight into our true costs for acquiring customers. We now reach a decision that is reverse of the decision based on a cost-per-click metric: We need to decrease our spending on ‘dentist’ and increase our spending on ‘oral surgeon’.
In short, the presence of conversion tracking delivers the information advantage to make decisions that reflect the true cost-of-conversion for each keyword. It allows us to improve the profitability of our campaigns and greater overall business success.
(Also see Clickable’s Best Practice on Conversion Tracking)
Clickable Simplifies Conversion Tracking
If the results of conversion tracking are so obvious, why doesn’t everyone use conversion tracking? Shockingly, we recently analyzed over 1,000 search-advertising accounts of small and midsize businesses and found that over half failed to properly track conversions. We suspect this is largely due to the complexity associated with setup, as well as the sophistication required to act on the data.
We developed Clickable Conversion Tracking to address these fundamental challenges affecting so many advertisers. Here are the primary benefits that will boost your success:
- Remove the burden and errors inherent with managing multiple tracking systems on your Web site: Traditionally, each search engine requires you to install an engine-specific pixel or JavaScript snippet on your Web site to track conversions from that single engine. That is, if you were advertising on two search engines, you would be required to have 2 snippets on your Web site. If you added another search engine, then you would be required to go and change all your pages once again to add the snippet for the third search engine. We have eliminated the need to have multiple snippets by using a single snippet that works across all the major search engines.
- Eliminate tagging complexity and errors: We wanted to hide and automate the unique tagging of each destination URL, a tedious but necessary task for tracking conversions. All changes to destination URLs are made by Clickable with the press of a button. This assures that your tagging is complete (no destination URL is missed) and consistent (all destination URLs are tagged similarly). It’s that easy!
- Orchestrate the multi-step process that starts with setting up conversion tracking to optimizing your campaigns: The process of optimizing your campaigns based on your conversions can quickly get overwhelming. An advertiser has to put together a jigsaw puzzle of variables, snippets, page footers, cost assumptions, and goal settings among many other tasks. Clickable simplifies this process and dramatically boosts productivity by enabling advertisers to specify their conversion and campaign goals with Clickable. Clickable orchestrates the rest by relaying conversion data continuously to Clickable’s ActEngine to deliver you the best recommendations and highest profitability.
We hope you’ll try Clickable Conversion Tracking and let us know what you think. Our customers play a large role in building and shaping nearly every aspect of Clickable. If you need help with setup, we’re standing by to support you.