Kevin Lee: 10 Conversion Events You Should Be Tracking

by | Sep 12, 2013 | Articles, PPC

mobile device in handSeptember 12, 2013: In his latest ClickZ article, Didit CEO Kevin Lee identifies a way to break out of the last-click attribution trap that may be artificially limiting the potential of your PPC campaign. The answer is to assign values to events which — while not conversions themselves — constitute proxy behavior that can and should be valued when budgeting your campaign.

Kevin notes that there are many proxy metrics that can be useful in this process, including:

  1. Email newsletter registrations. The email inbox is a key way to maintain contact with prospects. Even next-generation platforms such as HubSpot have email as a core pillar. So come up with a value for an email registration and give paid search credit when it drives those registrations.
  2. Visits to the contact us page. Unless you rely exclusively on online sales through a shopping cart, you should be able to make a strong argument that a significant percentage of visits to your contact us page have a high level of purchase intent. Track your “contact us” page and assign it an appropriate value.
  3. Phone calls. Like visits to the contact us page, phone calls are a great touch point and behavior that signals intent to buy.
  4. Internal site search (particularly for important keywords). If your site is large, you probably have an internal search engine. In the same way that Google/Bing searches are a great way to understand buying intent, so are internal searches. Consider whether or not to value internal search behavior.
  5. Deep navigation. If someone spends a long time on your site and drills around looking at a lot of product or service information, that’s important to factor in. For many businesses high engagement is correlated with and causal to sales increases.
  6. Facebook likes or application registrations. It is possible to track whether or not your paid search campaigns are resulting in Facebook likes. If you are thinking of attributing a value to a like generated by your Facebook paid campaign, you certainly should give your PPC search campaign the same or similar valuation for the same behavior.
  7. Twitter follows. Similar to Facebook, some marketers see Twitter as a social form of CRM. So, if a Twitter “follow” has a value, then track it within paid search and assign that value to your bidding strategy.
  8. Tweets. Tweets are a bit more difficult to assign value to. However, if your content is engaging and funny and results in lots of tweets, perhaps a blended value per tweet is worth counting.
  9. LinkedIn share (particularly for B2B). Business-to-business marketers love LinkedIn and they should. The audience there is well suited and often in a business mindset when engaging.
  10. Google G+ engagement. Last but far from least is Google+ (G+1) behavior. Not only is this a CRM touch point, but it actually helps your paid search campaign when you turn on social extensions.

Read complete article at ClickZ.com.

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