I obviously agree with Judah in regard to getting at the raw data from a web analytic’s perspective. Omniture is the least flexible compared to the other vendors in the marketplace.

-Darren

I’d love to hear more about what you end up doing to solve your issue. It’s pretty fascinating. Personally, I’ve always had a bad taste for toolbars. Blame folks like the company formerly known as Viewpoint for biasing me in the 1990’s when I equated toolbars with spam/spyware/adware, and still haven’t been able to recover. Another challenge is that if you can carve out the segment of reacquirers, how do you gently get them to do what you want, without freaking them out about what you know about their behavior (i.e. we’ve been tracking you and know what you do type of thing… stop clicking on our paid links!).

Robbin: I try to write in Wordpress, but when I do use Word, I paste it to Notepad, then paste to Wordpress. Probably should employ alternative methods, like upgrading to Office 2007, or using Open Office or Google Docs… I know, I know, but old habits die hard.

Thank you for your feedback! The reason we started the in-house initiative was to confirm our conversion numbers with AdWords and YSM tracking. The actual conversions we logged in our database, client registrations, were not matching the numbers reported by AdWords and YSM. The paid search platforms do include the re-acquired clients, which obviously is not good for us if we are trying to optimize our budget/keywords using this data.

We have tried using different third party tools, and will try Omniture later this year (still negotiating master service terms). We have developed two solutions for this problem. The first solution we tried was to track registrations instead of sales on Adwords and YSM, but this caused other difficulties. This solved the re-acquisition problem, but then we could not tie the final sale price to the keyword. We were able to determine only that a registration had occurred. That made optimization difficult, hence another reason for the in-house solution; we can now track multipoint conversions (registration and sale) using detailed click stream analysis.

The second solution, which has not yet been implemented, is to incentivize our clients to use the normal login link from our home page. We are also working on a tool bar from http://www.conduit.com/ (custom toolbars from our neighbors on 71 Stevenson Street) that will give our clients a discounted price if they continue to use our Papercheck toolbar that is installed in either IE or FireFox. The solutions have not been tested for a long period of time, so the jury is still out on whether this will eliminate the problem. I will keep you posted.

Regards,

Darren Shafae
http://www.papercheck.com

Yes, I did say Agony. Why is it so hard to get cost and revenue?

For example, I have a friend who runs a site that caters to smart technologists where he claims that like 85% of the folks block ads and probably don’t execute javascript.

And then you have the sites that cater to way less technically savvy audience, and they think cookies are good for eating and blocking is what you do in football. Hah!

Apparently geography has an impact too. I’m told Germans do a lot of ad blocking, but that’s just anecdotal.

How to detect this? That’s a tough one, and a time consuming analysis. But I may take your advice and give my $.02 in another post.

June D: I agree. Complimentary as usual! And I’m glad you linked to your piece.

While I’m a strong believer in standards, and the work at the WAA and IAB, it’s going to be a long slog before we have anything enforceable or standardized in either WA or AM.

The Online Ad business is much furthur along in defining/mapping deeper workflows, guidelines, and “standards.” That’s probably because the ad business is more evolved than analytics and more easily tied/attributable to revenue. In analytics most companies still struggle with the ROI! Then again so do a lot of advertisers! LOL!

Darren: Agony! LOL! Data verification is also complex to do, and requires a company invest time/resources to figure it out. You make an excellent point about an in-house analytics tool and having all the raw data.

The challenge with running “in-house” is that it takes resources, time, money, process, people, savvy to execute on the in-house vision. It’s not easy, but when you can prove that there’s an ROI for doing so, much easier to get all that.

And part of that ROI may be in correcting that problem of “re-acquisition” you highlighted. How frustrating that these customers are eating your PPC budget and bookmarking the URL!

Have you determined a solution for correcting this issue? What search term are they clicking, are you organically optimizing for that term? Perhaps a campaign that gives them some incentive to bookmark a new URL?

I am very excited to know that I am not the only one who experiences the agony of verifying data. We have used several third-party tools over the years and have finally made the move to an in-house analytics tool. I find that our own system provides the most value, but obviously it is more time- consuming and expensive to build and update.

However, the chance to interact with the raw data in order to build custom reports and to integrate YSM and Google APIs is invaluable. I found a disturbing trend in which some of our clients habitually depend on Google AdWords to locate our Web site. Clients use a keyword on Google to locate our adtext and then enter our site through the paid link. This would be okay if it was their first visit, but these are registered clients, who have made purchases in the past. I am not sure if this is widespread across other industries, but it is something to keep in mind when you see keywords with insane conversion rates.

I have also verified that these clients are not bookmarking the CPC destination URLs. I recently switched the destination URLs, yet the same clients are repeat offenders.

I guess in addition to trying to get your numbers to match, you will also need to scrub your conversions for “re-acquired” clients. If we had solely relied on third-party tools, we would have never caught this anomaly. It is one thing to understand the numbers, metrics, and KPIs, but I guess nothing replaces interacting with the raw data.

Best regards,

Darren Shafae
http://www.papercheck.com