One small but important step in our setup of Onlynaturalpet.com is to configure their Omniture SiteCatalyst implementation to correctly assign revenue credit for search keywords.

As you probably know, many people execute several searches, often over the course of several days, clicking on different paid keywords along the way before finally making that purchase.

When this happens, which keyword(s) should get the credit for the sale?

• Is it the keyword they clicked on that last visit where they executed the transaction?
• Is it the keyword that first brought them to your site?
• Should the credit be distributed across the keywords in some fashion?

This might sound like a small matter. But what if 50% of your visitors didn’t buy during their first search or visit? What if nearly one-half of your revenue was being allocated at least partially to the ‘wrong’ keywords?

Would this impact the decisions you made about which ones to bid up and which ones to bid down or pause?

Importance of Proper Allocation

For onlynaturalpet.com nearly 35% of their paid search visitors do not buy on the first visit. (We learn this in Omniture Discover 2 – neither SiteCatalyst nor most other packages can separate this metric for paid search vs other visitors.)

We also know that around 50% of their purchases do not occur on the same day as the first visit. (Unfortunately that number can’t be broken out for paid vs other visitors, even in Discover.)

Both of these statistics, however, suggest that lots of paid search visitors are not buying based on the first keyword they click. Shifting 20-30-40% of our revenue to different keywords would have a huge impact on any analysis of success or future campaign recommendations.

Revenue Allocation in SiteCatalyst

We choose to use linear revenue allocation in SiteCatalyst, splitting the revenue evenly between all keywords that the user clicks on along the way. While imperfect, we think this is far better than having all of that revenue accrue to the last keyword, or putting all of it to the first one they searched.

It’s worth noting that most analytics packages including Google Analytics, and the search engine ‘conversion tracking’ systems do not allow you to control allocation. In reports from those systems, all revenue is assigned to the last keyword a users clicks. Yahoo Panama tracks the number of assists, but doesn’t shift the revenue. If like most sites you have a significant portion of your revenue coming from visitors not purchasing on the first visit, this limitation means you’re looking at numbers (when reviewing keywords and ad-groups) with a fairly serious distortion.

For onlynaturalpet we set this allocation method several months ago, so even our historical data in any reports is based on this linear allocation.

Summary

Soon we’ll be making important decisions based on the information available from the search engine reports and our analytics software. While it’s easy and tempting to just trust the numbers provided, very often it’s important to understand how these numbers are arrived at before making decisions based on them.

Revenue from paid search and its allocation to keywords is a great example of a tiny detail that has big implications for the success of your PPC campaigns.

This post is part of a case-study series on the Commerce360 management of paid search campaigns for onlynaturalpets.com. It is being done with the kind permission of Only Natural Pet Store, and some data has been changed to keep PetSmart guessing. For your convenience, we’re keeping a list of all posts in the series.