How many of your accounts show that the majority of sales occur within one click? I have worked on accounts that achieve over 65% of their sales from single visits, or did they? I think this is where, we may over analyse and the data can be misleading.

The data says one click, one sale, but the reality is that the user could have moved from their work station to their home laptop, meaning we lose the cookie data and are left with one click, one sale.

The heavy focus on analysis means we are now forced into having conversations at keyword level when we should be looking at the performance of the campaign as a whole.

Let me get one thing straight; this does not mean you don’t have to optimise your accounts. There is always room to improve.  What it does mean is that deleting a keyword should be the last resort and not the first. Search Engine Marketers (SEM’s) are often trigger happy while focusing on the keywords bringing in the sales.

In most cases they find that once they delete the so called underperformers, the sales fall for the top performers. Funny how that happens! As long as keywords are relevant to your business they have a part to play.

There will be some keywords that generate traffic but no direct sales, does this mean they have no place in your account? I’ll let you decide, but, before you do, make sure you tick all the boxes before deleting!

What are the boxes? That’s for another time, but same place!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Google analytics, ppc, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.