Thread: PPC Management Nightmare

Hi Guys,

For those of you who advertise on google, yahoo and bing, how do you go about monitoring your conversions and true ROI?

I have analytics set up (conversions too) but I find that the only way to truly see if I'm profitable or not is to review every order, check the referrer, and create a tedious spreadsheet that I manually update daily to monitor referrer, clicks, cpc, ad costs, orders, revenue, COGS and net profit.

Analytics is a little deceiving unless you know who sponsors all the referrals, and also it doesn't take into account phone orders.

I'm just curious how you handle the data nightmare.

Thanks!
~ Al

An alternative to maintaining the spreadsheet you might wish to consider, automating the aggregation that information into a report would be a relatively straightforward process. You could easily extract the order referrer via WSI, aggregate such with the advertising and analytics data and perform your analysis from there, or if you're looking for the data in real-time you could export the referrer via an event handler as your orders come in.

Hope such helps,

Dusty
ASPDotNetStorefront Staff

Hi Dusty,

Thank you for your response. I understood 10%

But I do understand the gist. I hadn't thought of an automated solution, but that's very interesting. A daily report that would spit out revenue, shipping, COGS, and referrer would definitely be helpful. I'll check with your developer list and see how much a report like that would cost.

Anyone out there doing an automated report / event handler to help manage and analyze your PPC campaigns/ROI? Chime in if so.

Thanks again Dusty,
~ Al

I'm surprised no one else had any comments or input. Most of you with stores must be spending money advertising, let's hear from you.

I run a pretty elaborate spread sheet tracking everything and I'm still only 85% accurate (hopefully), and I'm only advertising on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for now. I can't imagine how complex it gets when I'll start adding marketplaces, affiliate networks, email campaigns, direct mail and magazine advertising.

How are you managing/tracking your marketing? Maybe more importantly, how confident are you of the analysis?

I do a lot of guessing. My goal is to tighten this up during the upcoming year.

Here's what we do - keep in mind there's still some manual steps but it works pretty well for us.

On our back end we use QB Pro linked to our website via T-Hub. In QB's we have setup each sales avenue (Google, Base, Bing, Yahoo, Nextag, Phone-In, Organic Search and a few more...) as a sales rep. Than when were processing an order (verify payment method, ship to address etc..) we also check the referral link and that's how we determine who the rep is. In some cases we may be displayed in all three locales on the search page (adwords, base and organic) and we have to dig a little bit more. For large orders that aren't obvious we'll look at our live chat control panel and lookup the specific customer. Our live chat software tracks every facet of the users visit to our site including the entry url which we have tagged for each sales avenue (ie. default.aspx?src=bing).

From there we utilize the reports in QB's such as sales by rep summary.

Another note: we also track repeat customers using the same method, ie google rc, bing rc, organic re, etc. The only thing we don't do for repeat customers is change their orig. sales ave. For instance if they orig. came in from GA (google adwords) but one the second order they came through via organic or bing we just update the rep to be GA-RC (adwords repeat customer).

Using the above methods we're able to fairly accurately track the sales avenues and keep track of our repeat sales. What I haven't mentioned is we also use Google analytics ecomm to verfiy all of our paid traffic and I still have to export reports to excel from QB and build monthly tracking/trending reports.

Yeah, it's a lot of work but I can analyze monthly and weekly trends (I don't analyze daily trends) and determine whether or not changes need to be made to PPC campaigns or whatever.

We just started using crystal reports and that's opened up the door for more data analysis far beyond what QB's can do.

Hope this helps or at least gives you some ideas.

-David