Cookie Lifespan + Search Marketing = Latent ROI
Jan 17, 2008 Analytics Tools
Regardless of the analytics suite you use to track your visitors, the majority use cookies to identify unique visitors, session statistics and performance metrics effectively. No one really knows what the average lifetime of cookies are, nor can anyone ideally measure their accuracy, but they work well enough to satisfy search marketing budgets and ROI. So which factors will influence the effectiveness of a visitor cookie over time?
The primary factor that is going to determine the effectiveness of a tracking cookie is user behavior. There are several things a user can do to ruin conversion data including:
- Clearing cookies in their browser
- Researching purchase decisions on one computer, converting on a purchase on another computer
- Being an influencer, but not decision maker in an organization; several eyes potentially clicking multiple times on an ad for a single purchase
- Run Spyware applications to clean up malware, and unfortunately many cookies
It’s obvious that there are several things users can do to alter success metrics, but the advertiser isn’t without their own analytics bag of tricks. For instance, advertisers are able to increase conversion by implementing any of the following marketing ideas:
- Price: giving your landing page products a sharp price will force visitors to think twice about converting quickly.
- Product: a technically superior or better valued product could make the difference between a customer that seriously considers a purchase and a visitor that has to go elsewhere.
- Place: the placement of the ads themselves will usually have some influence on your conversion rates. For example, depending on your competition, your ad that averages position 3.3 might convert better than that same ad averaging position 1.2.
- Promotion: this is my favorite, as many visitors tend to convert faster when a time-limited promotion is included in a landing page or ad itself.
If you’re having difficulty tracking metrics that are normalized and predictable, you may want to question your analytics vendor about implementation settings. There are several settings that can be adjusted to assist in conversion tracking, including:
- Vendor type: some vendor cookies are preferred over others in Spyware programs.
- Cookie life: the longer the life of a cookie the better. Most browsers will respect cookie life settings, even if they exceed standard lifespans such as 30 days or 60 days.
- Cookie type: the standard cookie type is first party, and requires both standard and secure implementation paths.
Results will vary with analytics suite and campaign type, but in some cases clicks and revenue can be as predictable as the changing seasons. In the very best case scenario, latent revenue and ROI can often show up well after a campaign is running. In some observed cases, ROI has been tracked for campaigns turned off up to 6 months prior.
January 21st, 2008 at 7:47 pm
[...] that our metrics are only as good as our tracking allows. I touched on tracking accuracy a few days ago. In addition, many companies find it nearly impossible to correlate offline conversions with [...]
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:12 am
That is an interesting article. In our experience website owners find it difficult to understand visitor behaviour even with good systems such as Google Analytics.
We have recently come across an excellent piece of software that not only allows them to monitor individual user behaviour in real time, but also facilitates direct engagement between visitor and user. This has been increasing conversions by an average of 15% in the websites we have implemented it in.
It seems that the individualised data gives a more enlightening perspective.