Measuring time from click to conversion for your paid search campaigns

15Feb10

You probably know how to gather data for your website with the free web analytics software Google Analytics. All you need for Analytics to be able to start working for your site is to paste your individual tracking script into the code of all the pages that you would like to monitor. If you haven’t worked with web analytics yet, Google Analytics is a great, user-friendly tool that can also be used for more advanced analysis once you get a grip on how to interpret your website data.

Now, if you are running paid search ads to promote your business you also know that you can synchronize your Analytics account with your AdWords account to get access to some additional, informative reports. There are, however, two more reports that are extremely helpful for tourism-related sites that are being referred to by AdWords campaigns: visits to purchase and days to purchase.

You need to apply a little trick to get access to the two. They are part of the e-commerce tab in Google Analytics and have been developed for online shops. The Analytics script on your site is not sufficient to collect all the data these reports need. They want to know how many items someone put in the shopping cart, where the buyer is located and what the total worth of the purchase was. The e-commerce code, thus, needs to be implemented in addition to the Analytics code – and it looks very complex and intimidating! In tourism, you will often only want one thing: generate a lead to your sales team, who will take care of the enquiry. The solution for your site is to cut the e-commerce script down to its bare bone so that it can do its duty without you having to assign all sorts of item values and products to it.

This is what the customised e-commerce script will have to look like. Just replace the generic ID marked below with your individual Analytics ID and paste the code anywhere above the closing head tag of your HTML – preferably at the bottom of the page so it gets carried out after all the other important scripts on the page.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ?
“https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(“<script src=’” + gaJsHost +
“google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’>” +
“</sc” + “ript>”);
</script>

<script type=’text/javascript’>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXX-1“);
pageTracker._setLocalRemoteServerMode();
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();

var timeObj     = new Date;
var unixTimeMs  = timeObj.getTime();
var unixTime    = parseInt(unixTimeMs / 1000);
var orderID     = pageTracker._visitCode() + ‘-’ + unixTime;

pageTracker._addTrans(
orderID,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“”
);

pageTracker._addItem(
orderID,
“”,
“”,
“”,
“1″,
“1″
);

pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>

Why do you need to know how many days it took a visitor to actually enquire?

In a German Google webinar on the possibilites of marketing tourism products in today’s tight economy it was said that on average, people take 29 days from first clicking on one of your ads to actually visiting your site again to send you an enquiry. This is important information for you – it gives you insight on the booking behaviour of your clients. You can derive direct actions from this valuable data.

If visitors for instance come back to your site often before making an enquiry, you might want to treat them differently when they get back to you the second or third time – using their cookie information to facilitate the re-entry for them and accommodate them with relevant content. And if you ask yourself if it is really worth bidding on those broad, generic terms as visitors often seem to enquire through much more specific keywords – maybe a generic keyword was what brought them to your site in the first place. You can use the utm_nooverride=1 string, attached to your URLs, to tell Analytics to remember the first ad people had clicked on: http://www.example.com/?utm_nooverride=1.

By default, it would just delete this information with a new entry when people click on another of your ads after the first one.

Advertisement

Filed under: Analytics, SEM   |  1 Comment
Tags: e-commerce, google analytics, ppc, SEM, web analytics