How important is the latency reporting problem for PPC discussed earlier this week?

Take a look at this report snippet from onlynaturalpet.com. As part of our initial work on the account we’ve been cleaning up the organization of many ad-groups, so since early December there has been quite a lot of campaign and ad-group reorganization going on.

Weeks later reviewing a portion of the January results, we see clearly the impact of the way latent orders are handled – a bunch of ad-groups with zero spend, zero clicks, but orders and revenues.

Of course this only shows half the story. Each of those ad-groups has been recreated in a different location within the campaign, so there is a corresponding ad-group elsewhere in the report which shows both clicks and revenue for this same time frame, but as compared to peer ad-groups that weren’t part of the clean-up, the new ones suffer from much lower revenue (because all their trailing revenue is still being reported here in the old groups).

For beyond the fact that reporting both clicks and revenues when they happen as opposed to attributing revenue to the click that provoked it distorts reports by assuming that costs and revenues are constant when they’re not (see the earlier post for a better explanation), we have the problem that after making organizational changes your reports have severe limitations (they’re sort of worthless) until many weeks after the changes.

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.