Click assists, impressions, goals and the Stanley Cup
Publié le 20 mai 2010 par Marc-Antoine
As the hockey series have taken over Montreal, I thought it would have been a good idea to start talking about assists & goals from one of AdWords’ latest features: Search Funnels. Released around March 23rd, the Search Funnel feature enables you to analyze how your visitors are using paid search results, by visualizing which ads and keywords they have used to get to your site and perform a conversion. Notice how I used “paid search results” and nothing else? Yes, that’s correct, Search Funnels allow you to strictly analyze, well, paid search keywords only. Forget about that free awesome one-place-for-all-sources-software capable of crunching first and third party cookies. That’s too bad. Nonetheless, if you can make sense of it all, I guess this feature can be pretty useful.
In my opinion, the two new categories that are really important are the assisted conversions and the top paths. The former simply because it enables you to see how much your campaigns/ad groups/keywords are involved in the process of generating conversions and the latter because you can easily visualize how your users are getting to your site. First and Last Click analysis are more or less interesting to me, because they don’t allow you to easily know your visitor’s search paths. I’m not a big fan of multi-day-based metrics like the one found in Time Lag, simply because people delete their cookies a lot. Plus most of the time, the displayed data will look like this: 75% day 1, 10% day 2 and 15% day 96+, so in the end you don’t really learn anything. Again that’s only my opinion, lots of Web Analytics specialists will disagree and I’m perfectly fine with that. As some would suggest, the secret lies in the trends, not in the absolutes.
Other pretty cool metrics include the Assist/Last ratios. These can tell you how far or how close the user is to his final decision. For example, a low A/L campaign ratio indicates people usually click on the ad and convert right away. A high A/L ratio means people are still browsing around. Such ratios can help answer questions like: a campaign of mine isn’t converting, but driving lots of traffic, should I keep it or delete it? If such a campaign has a really high A/L ratio, maybe you should. Removing it might only reduce your visibility on search pages and ultimately hurt conversions.
Keyword paths are great too, but lack the ability to easily see impressions to keywords paths. It would have been nice to see when users saw an ad and then used a new keyword to enter the website. Another thing that’s missing is data from the AdSense network; while I know this is a technical puzzle, if one day we were able to analyze the data from the AdSense network in Search Funnels, that would be really great.
In conclusion, Search Funnels allow to better assess the value of your keywords if you were ever wondering how they all tie up together to generate goals. Much like a hockey team, sometimes they have to work together to win!
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Tags: Adwords, click assists, conversion assists, search funnels
