Looking at Clicks “Assists”: Challenges of Multi-click Conversions

Multi-Channel Converisons
ClickZ’s “Study: Search Marketers Undervalue ‘Assists’” article reports on a 360i and SearchIgnite study covering the topic of “multi-click conversions”:

The study found more than 60 percent of conversions were completed with one click on a marketer’s natural or paid listings. The other 37.3 percent of transactions were completed with at least one “assist” click on a marketer’s search listings. These multi-click conversions accounted for two-thirds of the total clicks measured in this study, according to David Berkowitz, director of strategic planning at 360i.

SEM and SEO Interplay
While the study is the first one I’ve seen covering conversion “assists” with hard statistics, the study itself is not news. For example, its been known that many search marketers have been tempted to kill bids on “unbranded” search terms because the ROI was on “branded” organic terms, only to find their ROI on “branded” search terms tank as a result. What’s happening is that searchers click from unbranded terms then coming back days, weeks later using branded terms and converting.

Indeed, the study finds:

[The second] most common progression led from a click on a paid result of a non-branded search to a click on a natural result of a branded search, which took place 22.4 percent of the time.

This study finally adds hard data that will better help recognize the interplay between SEO and SEM and also demonstrates theneed for a strong analytics tool that recognizes that conversion is a multi-step process, not based on a single point of entry (ads, organic listings, emails etc).

How to Measure SEO Success?
The report found that the most common path were “clicks on a natural result for a non-branded search [that] led to clicks on a natural result of a branded search”, which occurs 32.5% of the time.

There are two issues brought up by this statistics:

  1. A user first coming to a site via “Unbranded Search” and comes back via a “Branded Search” means Branding is Happening via being present in the SERPs(organic listings)
  2. Can you still define SEO success by the “quality” of the organic traffic?

The first part is a no brainer, but the second issue is more difficult.

Previously, high rankings were the metrics for SEO success and now its traffic quality and ROI converisons.

But what is traffic quality? If its about attracting new customers who have not heard of your company, it seems practical that measuring unbranded visitor traffic seems key. But, these visitors are most likely to convert when then switch from becoming “unbranded” visitors to “branded” visitors. Is your analytics tool tracking that?

For Google Analytics at least, the answer seems to be no:

[A] visitor may initially reach your site through a CPC ad and not make a purchase. Later, this visitor may return to your site via a tagged link in an email to make their purchase. In this case, Google Analytics will attribute the more recent campaign information to the resulting sale – the tagged link in the email.

Any comments for analytics folks?


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