STUDIES HAVE SHOWN THAT THE IMPACT of a given search marketing campaign probably shouldn't be measured solely by online conversions to a sale. A lot of searchers research their purchase online but then go offline to buy.
A report last December by comScore Networks and sponsored by Yahoo! found that 92% of consumer electronics and computer customers who made a purchase after at least one search in 2004's first quarter were far more likely to buy offline than on.
That offline buying makes it difficult for marketers to keep track of the return on investment of their search engine marketing campaigns. Offline sales also make it difficult to find the best way to optimize SEM, since marketers may not be sure which keywords are converting best into offline sales.
Merchant Warehouse, a Boston company offering credit card processing services and equipment to marketers, has been a strong believer in search engine marketing since its founding. The company has also run an extensive in-house call center to turn sales leads into conversions; in fact, that call center produced 75% to 80% of its sales.
“We've got a complex product, with too many details for a straight online transaction,” says president Henry Helgeson, whose firm processes $2 billion in credit card transactions annually. “You've just got to get on the phone with your merchant to sell our service. So on our Web site we drive to a toll-free number, not to a pre-application form or an actual online sale.”
Helgeson says Merchant Warehouse knew its search marketing efforts were working — just not which campaigns were producing the most calls. Then about two years ago the company was approached by ClickPath Media of Kirkland, WA, formerly a straight search marketing firm. ClickPath had noticed the same lack of offline phone tracking capability for search advertising and was working on an application to fill that need. It asked if Merchant Warehouse would like to serve as a test bed for the early version of its platform. “We weren't even a beta tester — more like an alpha tester,” Helgeson says.
With ClickPath's system, any searcher who clicks through a sponsored listing to Merchant Warehouse's Web site sees an 800 phone number in the upper right of their screen that's unique to that keyword and search engine. The number persists throughout the searcher's session thanks to client-side JavaScript code and HTML tags on the Web page. When that search moves to a phone call, Merchant Warehouse knows the engine and ad that produced it.
Merchant Warehouse began using ClickPath's system about 14 months ago and very quickly began to see benefits. The new visibility into what worked and what didn't allowed the firm to reallocate SEM spending to the most productive keywords. That's crucial in its category, where cost per click can run very high.
Before using ClickPath, Merchant Warehouse had been operating on the rough rule of thumb that for every online action on a keyword, the company probably received three or four offline calls. And when ClickPath's first tracking results came in, Helgeson says, he was concerned because that rule wasn't proving out: Some terms were producing many more phone calls, and some far fewer.
“But within a few days, we realized we were getting consistent results from ClickPath,” he says. “So it wasn't its system that was out of whack. It was our assumptions.”
Overall, Helgeson says, Merchant Warehouse's cost per click was cut as much as 75% for some campaigns by sorting the keyword sheep from the goats.
