Lousy Ad or Lousy Page?

The most attractive feature of direct response online advertising is its "trackability". There are numerous ways to track the effectiveness of your online campaigns down to a very granular level. In spite of this, I know some pretty big players who pay little or no attention to these ROI measures when making decisions about their ad spend.

While this is indeed a head-scratcher, what about the rest of you who dutifully turned on all those various conversion tracking mechanisms, dropped those tracking scripts on your web pages, and laboriously configured your web analytics, and STILL don't have a clear picture of what's working?

If you're selling low-consideration items with an average ticket of under $50, you likely have very accurate conversion stats. If you sell furniture and have 3- and 4-digit average tickets, it's another story.

Why? It's something called "lagged conversion", which just means that the customer doesn't buy the first time they come to your website. In fact, they may visit 3 or 4 times, and call you a couple of times as well, before they finally buy. Unless you have some pretty comprehensive systems in place to deal with this behavior, your conversion rates as reported by Google or Yahoo! will likely be discouragingly low because the tracking data can't follow the customer through all these steps.

The most common way to lose conversion data is when the sale is closed over the phone. Can the customer remember the keyword phrase they typed, or the ad version they clicked on, or even the site they found your ad on? Not likely.

So if you're selling something that invites a large % of phone inquiries, don't immediately assume that your online ads are worthless because of the low conversion % they show. Instead, look at the products that seem to sell strongly over the phone. Are these items easy to order without assistance online, or do they have lots of options to choose from? If people are buying a lot of certain products over the phone, maybe it's becuase they can't figure out how to buy it without help. If so, fix the page!