Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I am pretty new to internet marketing (2 months) and found WW a few days ago.......thank God!
Having read masses of posts in pretty much every forum, I have turned my marketing strategy on its head and am starting from scratch. I would really appreciate some help to get the ball rolling.
I am looking to primarily concentrate on the PPC side of things as I need listing pretty instantly. Have read and digested many posts with regards to targeted keyword ads etc. and have created a long list of keywords and phrases to get started.
My main question is how I go about tracking ROI. I am using WebTrens Log Analyzer and would like to continue using it if at all possible as it has been supplied by NetIQ for free. If anybody could please give me some advice (or point me in the right direction) as how best to set up Log Analyzer to let me calculate ROI I would be eternally grateful!(beginning to pull hair out!)
Have managed so far to seperate out my report data to show tracking URL visits by way of content groups. I imagine that I will then have to use visitor sessions to help with ROI but not sure.
TIA
It is very difficult to track ROI on PPC campaigns mostly due the to fluctuating cost per click for each keyphrase you're bidding on.
What we do is, first create a seperate ad group/campaign for each exact keyphrase. Then, we flag each url with a variable so a URL would appear as such...
http*://www.widgetword.com/default.asp?campaign=AdWords&keyphrase=blue+widgets
In this way, I am able to retrieve both the campaign type and the exact phrase. Very important to do both. In addition to this, I add the ability to grab the referring domain name as well. This is nice as it shows you which engine brought you the business.
Then, design a cookie based system that retrieves the above mentioned info from the Referring URL. At the point of conversion, you can grab the info from the cookie and write it to the database.
In order to see your results, you should then create a report system that shows you the total earnings by campaign, drilling down to the keyphrase. Maybe you could extend this capability to offer the export of an excel spreadsheet.
To compare the results of your cost, vs. your earnings (ROI), download the reports from your campaigns for a given month and port into excel. Then, pull up your proprietary system report and compare away.
Let me know if you have any questions about this method. The nice thing is, it's free. It's easy to build, so long as you're proficient in either ASP or PHP and break it down into its fundamental elements, which are...
1. Craft tracking URLs in each campaign, for each keyphrase.
2. Code a method to extract variables from referring URL and write them to cookie.
3. Code a method to extract info from cookie at point of conversion.
4. Code a report system that can organize your results.
5. Take the time to compare cost vs. earnings (ROI)
It is an e-commerce site with a product range of about 500 items. The site has been built with Dreamweaver. The main page links to various dynamic pages (ASP) which group the products into categories. From the individual categories, users can add to cart and then check out. The check out procedure is the same for all products. Each new order has a unique order ref applied to it so it is really the linking of the initial tracking URL to the order ref (normally shown in the asp string) on the final checkout screen that is the issue.
Really hope this makes sense, I'm kinda getting used to all the lingo as well!
TIA
What you have said makes a great deal of sense. I have to be honest and say that this cookie coding scares the hell out of me. I'm learning more and more every day about all aspects of design and marketing but I really wouldn't feel safe applying my own code to the site at the moment. That is why I was hoping to achieve the same results using a log analyzer. Do you think I'm wasting my time?
If you don't want to figure out cookies, you can still try to do this with log analysis by considering each IP address unique. If you do this though, you need to realize that every IP address is not truly unique and if you expect a lot of traffic from AOL then you are probably in trouble.
My advice is to take the time to set up cookies to issue both a unique user cookie and a session cookie. Then find a way to write the first URL requested and its cookie values to a DB, and record the user id/session with every purchase.
This might seem a little heavy for someone just starting out, but you need to get ROI done properly from the get go or you could be wasting a lot of money and time.
