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I currently use Overture, Looksmart and Adwords for paid placement and am getting what I consider to be a *lot* of traffic from those ads, all of which are very specific and targeted (I believe) to potential customers who want what I have. I'm fortunate to have top placement for several keyword phrases on MSN, and I do pretty well on many other sites.
I'm also listed in several industry specific "directory" sites where I get a smaller number of visitors but I believe they're typically higher quality and very targeted visitors. Plus I have listings at Yahoo directory, DMOZ and about.com.
Unfortunately, while I average 100 to 150 visitors per day, my conversion rate seems very low - averaging only a couple of orders per day, sometimes 4 or 5. As a rough guess, I'd say the conversion rate is about 2% overall, maybe a little less.
So I'm at a point where I'm not convinced that the paid placement is really doing me any good, but I don't have any way to know for sure. I started capturing the IP address of customers a few weeks ago, but haven't spent much time digging through server logs to see where they're coming from. I also use query string tags on each of the PPC listings and log those visits to a separate logfile, but currently I don't gather the IP address of each visit.
I'm looking for tips for measuring my "ROI" on the paid listings, as well as trying to find out some idea of what a "good" ROI or conversion percentage is. What additional information should I capture from each customer and how can I efficiently go about determining whether the $200/month that I'm spending on advertising is worth the effort?
Thanks for any ideas.
[edited by: pageoneresults at 4:49 pm (utc) on June 9, 2003]
[edit reason] No specifics please. Thank you. [/edit]
Then place a value on the action that you are looking for from the client computer - a sign up for a special offer, a sale, etc - and calculate that into your per click costs.
After you have done the tagging & logging the various referrers & keyword strings to a seperate log file, and added in the cookies, it's a simple matter of creating the scripts to output some reports.
Give the client computer a cookie, then measure from there. Also use a session variable if possible in conjunction - as sometimes a client will be configured to not accept cookies, etc.
Most session mechanisms employ cookies, so if the client does not accept any cookies, then you won't be able to track sessions. (rewriting URLs for session tracking is a bad idea for many reasons)
But it is a good idea to set two cookies, one of which without expiration. There are some clients that are configured to only accept cookies without expiration. It's also a good idea to synchronize long-term cookies with session cookies, just to avoid issuing multiple visitor numbers for the same client in the same session.
That's pretty much what I use for my affiliate program.
And that's how I track adwords ads (each ad being treated as an affiliate). Works out pretty good.
