Catalyst Search Matters Search Marketing Blog

For transaction-based e-commerce websites, search engine marketing offers an unprecedented level of ROI measurement and accountability. E-commerce vendors can track their ROI on a keyword-by-keyword basis right down to the very last cent. But for other types of sites, evaluating the success of the campaign is more of a challenge. Consider, for example, these non-transactional types of sites:

• Pharmaceutical product sites, which merely provide information to potential customers, without actually selling the drug on the site.

• Business-to-business sites, where purchases are typically researched online, but are usually transacted offline.

• Television program and film sites, which use online marketing to capture a greater offline audience.
• Any site that primarily drives an offline conversion event.

E-marketers with sites like these, with no online transactions, are able to measure the quantity of visitors that a given keyword or campaign brings to their sites, but very often they mistakenly believe that they are unable to measure the quality of these visitors on a keyword-by-keyword or source-by-source basis. It is indeed possible to evaluate the success of a non-transactional campaign at a granular visitor-by-visitor level — it just requires more innovative use of the available tools. In this article, we explore some techniques for measuring and comparing the quality of visitors without the benefit of transaction data.

Exact Monetary Value vs. Relative Value
Once a campaign has an established budget, the question is exactly how best to spend it. In search marketing, the budget allocation can change dynamically in response to the success of different segments. In order to get the most out of the budget, we must answer questions, such as:

• How should efforts and funds be distributed across the different keyphrases

• Can higher quality visitors be obtained from broad, general, high-volume keyphrases (e.g. “medical education”) or narrow, specific, low-volume keyphrases (e.g. “psychiatry continuing medical education seminars”)?

• At which times of day do the highest-quality visitors come to the site, and should pay-per-click ads be scheduled accordingly?

• On which search engines should more of the pay-per-click budget be spent?

Of course, recording the exact monetary value of each visitor would be nice, but the above campaign management questions can be answered simply by determining the relative value of one segment of visitors versus another. But how do we assign any sort of value to a visitor with no conversion event?

Value and Quality Metrics
It is useful to think about visitor quality from the bottom up. Which visitors have zero quality and zero value? A visitor who arrives at the site, but who was looking for something else, is of no value. Therefore, any visitor who demonstrates non-disappointment should be considered a (slightly) more qualified lead than the disappointed, momentary, valueless visitor. To measure this, we can establish a preliminary goal of the visitor clicking-through to another page of the site.

However, where the visitor goes on the site can indicate vastly different levels of visitor quality. For example, at Lipitor.com, the visitor who clicks through to the “Understanding Cholesterol” page is less valuable that the visitor who clicks through to the “Questions to Ask Your Healthcare Provider about Lipitor” page. At Kaplan.com, the visitor who clicks through to the “What is the GMAT?” page is less valuable than the visitor who clicks through to the “Lookup GMAT Classroom Courses by Zip Code”. A click-through to an important page indicates that the visitor is a higher-quality visitor. By identifying these target pages, and establishing them as “conversions” or “goals” in a web analytics tool, we can roughly assess visitor quality without access to transaction data.

Which Pages Indicate High Visitor Quality
In general, those pages which indicate that the visitor is relatively likely to complete an offline conversion are appropriate as “goal” pages. Some examples of such pages are:

• Deeply embedded pages with very specific information, which are not typical landing pages for visitors from search. (Users who opt to click-through to these pages must have a relatively high level of interest in the site and brand).

• Pages where visitors sign up for newsletters, send product-related emails to others, or initiate memberships (In this case, actual execution of a signup is highly valuable, but clicking through to step one of a signup process is at least an indicator of higher-than average visitor quality. Very often, highly qualified visitors shy away from submitting personal information via the website, but their initial interest in membership, registration, etc. indicates that they have had a positive experience on the website.).

• Contact information pages, which enable the visitor is to pursue offline contact.

• Pages that explicitly prepare users to initiate offline conversions, such as “Questions to Ask Your Healthcare Provider” for Lipitor.com, “Print Enrollment Form” for Kaplan.com, or “Current Program Listings” for ESPN.com.

• Use of an interactive activity, such as a quiz, assessment, game, etc.

• Pages where visitors view within-site search results (Use of search within the site indicates the visitor has seen some part of the site and still expects they can find something there that they want elsewhere on the site.)

Point Systems for Integrating Goals of Different Values
Typical web analytics tools are built for transactional e-commerce. This means that they often have a built-in capability to assign a monetary value to different conversion events, and aggregate these values over visitor segments, such as campaign, keyword, source, or day part. This capability can be quite straightforwardly usurped to tabulate visitor quality within an arbitrary visitor quality point system. By assigning each goal event its own value relative to the other conversion events, an overall relative value for each segment can be tabulated automatically. While assigning particular values to these different events relative to one another may be a bit of an imperfect science, the data that can be gathered this way are far superior to no data at all.

Assessing Low Volume Segments
A rich system of both “small” and “major” goals provides a sophisticated tool to evaluate whether a particular segment is delivering the right kind of visitors. This is especially useful when segments are extremely small. For example, many non-transactional sites have a couple of goals set up, such as newsletter signup or registration, but these goals are only reached by a small fraction of visitors. When the goals are extremely infrequent, and the segment is relatively low in visitors, there may not be a large enough sample size to determine whether that segment’s failure to convert is a systemic problem or a statistical accident. “Small” goals provide a crucial diagnostic capability when campaigns contain many low-volume keyphrases that sum up to large volumes of traffic.

Conclusion
Search marketing provides far more detailed analytic capabilities than other ad media, and it is most effective when this capability is exploited to ensure that efforts and funds are focused on the most effective segments. Search marketers with non-transactional sites need not miss out on this advantage. By identifying important pages and implementing a rich system of non-transactional goals, any advertiser can determine the ideal combination of search marketing ingredients, which delivers the best overall results.