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 Salesforce.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.

• Chris Knoch
• 3 responses
•  Search Engine Marketing

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