PPC Attribution & Customized Landing Pages - Not Simple in a Social World

Customized landing pages for Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising with a custom PPC-only offer are useful for attributing sales and PPC campaign success, particularly when conversion is offline.

For example, if the PPC-only direct response offer is a printable coupon, the intent of a PPC-only coupon is to measure the ratio of coupon redemptions to coupon prints, and measure redemptions to PPC visits.

Sounds great, but what happens when PPC visitors want to share information about your great offer and start posting the PPC-only landing page web address (URL) in forums, blogs, etc.? Is this extra social publicity good or bad? Great or not so great?

It depends.

It's great because "These are free clicks! Free publicity! More people are finding out about our product. Response to the offer is up. Sales are up."

It's not so great because "Leakage overstates PPC campaign attribution. Slows down our reporting because we have to filter out visits" or, "How do we know when a coupon is redeemed if it's from PPC or social PR?"

This 'leakage' messes with straightforward, neat & quick campaign attribution, but if you're getting higher redemptions in store, from brand new customers, do you really want to turn these customers away? It's free publicity.

So, what can you do to provide some useful insights? Try the following:

1. Make sure you can attribute your direct response conversions (in this case, coupon prints) to your referrer source (search ppc, search organic, referring website URLs).
   
   
2. Analyze your referrers. Segment visitors and conversions by search engines and other referrers.
   
   
3. Attribute a fraction of your physical store redemptions to "other referrers". Estimate!
   
   
4. Consider periodically changing your final landing page URL. However, balance this with the extra work it might generate for you PPC campaign manager.
   

• To minimize work for your PPC campaign manager, you could try to use a single campaign URL followed by a redirect (301 type) to the final landing page URL. Mark sure you test first with your site and analytics tool. Your typed keyword and other query string data could be stripped by the redirect action, and you'll have no data at all.
  
  
• If you do change your landing page URL, make sure you have a good substitute "the online special you are looking for is no longer available" page, and route them to the main website section, or your regular online offer, whichever is applicable.
  

The numbers won't be perfect.

But do you need perfect numbers? Absolutely not.

You need enough 'right' information so you can decide whether PPC participation is worthwhile.

Do you continue with PPC, change your campaign, change your offier?

Make some assumptions to allow you to estimate PPC vs social PR media attribution. And consider that if the PPC campaign wasn't operating, the social PR would not have happened.

Keep business in mind and don't get over complicated. At the end of the day, if social PR gets you more new customers, just do steps 1, 2, 3 and be happy for the extra sales.

Your thoughts?

June Li
ClickInsight
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