For some time now traffic managers and analytics folk have been debating how best to attribute clicks to conversions. Should the first click get the credit? Should the last click get the credit? And what about the clicks in the middle, shouldn’t they get some credit?
Everyone has an opinion, everyone in the industry is talking about this problem and yet I can’t help thinking that we are still some way off solving this problem.
To try and help with this issue Google have now added “search funnel” functionality to their Adwords interface, a function that is intended to provide us with the necessary data to tackle this issue.
We’ve spent some time reviewing search funnel data on one of our new larger campaigns. The following stats are based on a months data in what we’d consider to be a sub-optimal campaign. Here’s a few alarming statistics to consider:-
Wow, 72.81%, I wasn’t expecting that! So, straight away we’ve clearly illustrated the problems arising from just relying on last click data. Having looked a little deeper we quickly realised that a big part of the problem here is the client aggressively targeting their own brand names (isn’t everyone nowadays!).
In fact, almost 21% of all last click phrases were brand phrases. Even if we take this into account and exclude these phrases we’re still left with 52% of conversions having different first and last phrases.
It also looks like this is a problem across ad groups and campaigns:-
And:-
As we have already mentioned 21% of the above variations across ad groups and campaigns is as a result of the aggressive branding campaign. However, even if we take into account the branding campaign we’re still left with 30%+ of conversions having different first and last ad groups/campaigns.
Ok, so now we’ve confirmed that this is a big problemits time to move onto a micro-moan, whilst I applaud Google for adding this functionality could they make it any harder to work with!?!
My biggest gripe isn’t the data itself but the fact that it’s hidden away in a separate section of the dashboard that isn’t easily accessible from within the main campaign, ad group and keyword sections of the interface.
What I’d like to see( if you’re listening Google!):-
1) The option to toggle an ”assisted conversions” colums and maybe even an “assisted conversion rate” column that is displayed alongside the standard 1-per click and many per click conversion columns.
2) ..or I’d really like to see a “Part Of Path” (I’m going to trademark this!) conversion column, which would total all conversions a particular keyword played a part in generating regardless of its position in a conversion path. This would really help those that don’t have time or budget to spend the hours and hours needed to thoroughly analyse the path data. We’d then be able to run off a report ranked by “Part Of Path (POP) Conversion” which whilst not perfect would help us to understand at a glance the most influential key phrases and adjust bid accordingly.
Now there’s an idea, I’ll be expanding on the POP conversion idea in my next blog post.
