Latent response and what it means to your success.…

Have you ever vis­ited a travel web­site mul­ti­ple times before book­ing your trip? Or a vis­ited a retail site mul­ti­ple times before pur­chase? How about an auto­mo­tive site — vis­it­ing many times before request­ing a brochure or test drive? If so, you’re not alone. In fact, the vast major­ity of Web users engage in some form of multi-visit or multi-session activ­ity before con­ver­sion. This type of behav­ior is often referred to as deferred, delayed, or latent response. And because it’s hap­pen­ing right now, on your site, it’s crit­i­cal to under­stand how it impacts your mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, con­ver­sion rates, ROI, web ana­lyt­ics, and busi­ness as a whole.

From early on, many web ana­lyt­ics and online mar­ket­ing mea­sure­ment plat­forms sim­ply tracked same-session con­ver­sion. For exam­ple, if a vis­i­tor clicked on a Google key­word, came to Omni​ture​.com and sub­mit­ted a lead in that visit, it would be recorded as a con­ver­sion. Fair enough.

But if this vis­i­tor vis­ited sev­eral times before fill­ing out a lead form, the orig­i­nal key­word would receive absolutely no credit. For mar­keters, this is a really big deal. In my expe­ri­ence, I’ve seen any­where from 10%-90% of con­ver­sions attrib­ut­able to multi-session activity.

So as a mar­keter, you could be under­stat­ing your cam­paign con­ver­sion by 10–90%! What appears to be your worst per­form­ing key­word could actu­ally be your best…poorly per­form­ing emails could be dri­ving sig­nif­i­cant ROI right under your nose…that ban­ner ad on Yahoo that you just killed, it could have been your best acqui­si­tion asset.

For­tu­nately, there are sev­eral ways to get your arms around latent response with web ana­lyt­ics and Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst. First, you should scope the issue. Is this really a prob­lem? To answer this ques­tion, start with a Visit Num­ber report. This report can be tied to any suc­cess event, such as rev­enues, leads, page views, etc. Look at how many vis­its it takes before vis­i­tors con­vert. What % of vis­i­tors are multi-session? Again, I’ve seen this any­where from 10%-90%. What is your %? Book­mark this report, because it will pro­vide an impor­tant baseline.

Now take a look at your mar­ket­ing cam­paigns as mea­sured in Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst. For exam­ple, search key­words, email, ban­ner, offline, etc. Ask your Site­Cat­a­lyst admin­is­tra­tor (if it’s not you) when these dif­fer­ent cam­paigns “expire”. In case you can’t find this, it is under Set­tings -> Edit Your Com­merce Variables.

When does your cam­paign expire? If it expires on the “Visit”, you’re effec­tively miss­ing the x% of con­ver­sion that you just observed in the Visit Num­ber report. Now you see why latent response is such a big deal!

But wait — before you change any­thing — talk this over with your team. There may be a good rea­son you are expir­ing cam­paigns on the “Visit”. For exam­ple, if you are mea­sur­ing inter­nal site pro­mo­tions it often makes more sense to expire on the “Visit” because inter­nal pro­mo­tions tend to be used as nav­i­ga­tion ele­ments more than actual multi-session campaigns.

If there is not a strong busi­ness case for keep­ing the sta­tus quo, then def­i­nitely change this to reflect multi-session activ­ity. And when you do, I’d rec­om­mend you use the Site­Cat­a­lyst cal­en­dar­ing event fea­ture to sig­nify that you’ve made this change — because you’ll surely see a sub­stan­tial uptick in con­ver­sion tied to your mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives and every­one will want to know what hap­pened and who should get the credit! If you’d like to dis­cuss this fur­ther, please do not hes­i­tate to email me.

Happy mar­ket­ing!