Advanced ROI Measurement Tactics, Part I: Online-Offline Revenue Tracking

When folks at Omni­ture talk about the con­ver­gence of Site­Cat­a­lyst and Search­Cen­ter, you’ll hear us get pretty excited. There are so many things a com­pany can do by lever­ag­ing the data avail­able from Site­Cat­a­lyst with the power of our search product.

But some­times, all our excite­ment must seem like we’re spout­ing pie-in-the-sky ideas. Because what we’re find­ing is that peo­ple are only scrap­ing the sur­face of what they can actu­ally do with Search­Cen­ter and their SEM cam­paigns. They’re stick­ing with the obvi­ous stuff, like mea­sur­ing orders that come from key­word cam­paigns — but they’re miss­ing the deeper level, such as look­ing at all the steps of the shop­ping cart con­ver­sion process and mea­sur­ing “micro­con­ver­sions” along the way.

Update: This post is the first in a series about SEM tac­tics that lead to greater ROI from search campaigns.

• Tac­tic #1. Online-Offline Revenue

Offline con­ver­sion data can be imported into Search­Cen­ter for report­ing and opti­miza­tion pur­poses. Once the data is imported, your paid search cam­paigns can be opti­mized based on offline lead fulfillment.

For exam­ple, we have a client whose aver­age order value is over $2,000. With a pur­chase that big, the client’s cus­tomers tend not to like to place their orders online. They pre­fer to pick up the phone. Omni­ture can give that client’s cus­tomers visit-level ref­er­ence num­bers. Here’s how it works: the per­son on the phone col­lects the ref­er­ence num­ber. Then, using a data sources file, the order can be uploaded into Site­Cat­a­lyst, and thus Search­Cen­ter. That enables the com­pany to track when a key­word is clicked on and when a pur­chase is made, whether the pur­chase hap­pens online or over the phone.

This is impor­tant, because cer­tain key­words might con­vert bet­ter offline, while oth­ers have bet­ter online con­ver­sion rates. If you have a key­word that dri­ves 70% offline con­ver­sions — and a higher aver­age order value than most online orders — you’d likely want to spend more on that key­word. But, if you thought the key­word was con­vert­ing poorly, because you didn’t track offline con­ver­sions, you might devalue it and spend less money on it.

The same tac­tic can work with lead gen­er­a­tion. Most search engine mar­keters mea­sure only to the point of the lead, because con­firm­ing leads tends to be a has­sle. But it’s easy with Omni­ture. If you’re using Sales​force​.com and also use Site­Cat­a­lyst and Search­Cen­ter, for exam­ple, Omni­ture inte­grates with Sales­force to get con­firmed leads, iden­tify the value of the rev­enue of those leads, load them back into Search­Cen­ter, and attribute them to the keyword/s that led to it.