Customers, Conversions and Tracking…Oh my!

A Review of Conversion-only Analytics and the New Conversion Assist Feature

You have a website with searchers visiting your site daily. Sounds like a good approach to distributing information about your product and services and drive sales. The only problem—you are not seeing a rise in sales to correspond with the amount of searchers visiting your site.

Here are a few things you can do today to increase your visitor-to-customer conversions:

• Provide an online form for visitors to complete to gain access to information related to purchase and business decisions, such as a white paper or an industry newsletter.
• Make your site content valuable to visitors by creating persuasive, solution-oriented web content. Adding a testimonial or guarantee of satisfaction is often most compelling.
• Track when visitors sign up for a trade show, request a price quote or respond to any call-to-action so you know which of your marketing strategies are most effective.

A great way to track the habits of visitors and evaluate which of your strategies are the most effective is to turn on our conversion-only analytics feature, which provides conversion and returns data for Sponsored Search and Content Match. Just follow these steps to turn on this feature of your search marketing account:

Enabling Conversion Only Analytics

1. Log in to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account.
2. If you have more than one master account, select the master account that should track the web site. If you do not have more than one master account, proceed to Step 3.
3. Click the “Administration” tab.
4. On the navigation bar below the Administration tab, click on “Analytics.”
5. If analytics are disabled, click the Enable Analytics button..
6. Select “Conversion Only Analytics.” Important: Do not click the “Activate” button. Instead, wait until you have installed the data collection tags on your web site to prevent the collection of inaccurate or partial data.

Copying the Conversion-Only Tag

1. You can customize your tag with a revenue amount and a transaction ID. To do so, you’ll need a text editor that allows you to edit HTML files.
   Click on the panel labeled “Conversion Only” at the bottom of the page, which will display your customized conversion only tag.
2. Underneath the Revenue Value label, select whether your custom conversion-only tag will have a revenue value assigned dynamically, or whether the system should store a default constant value.
   •  To assign a value dynamically, select “Dynamic Value” from the Revenue Value pop-up list and click “Save.”
   • To assign a constant value, select “Constant Average Value” from the Revenue Value pop-up list, enter the revenue amount in the textbox next to the Revenue Value pop-up list, and click “Save.”

3. Once you have installed the tags on your site, repeat steps 1-4 above and click the Activate button to begin tracking your conversions and their returns.

Conversion Assists
As mentioned on the blog a couple weeks back, our conversion analytics feature now has the ability to record “assists,” which can be used to further evaluate which of your terms are performing best. Assists track the number of times a keyword “assisted” in a conversion.

For more information on Yahoo! Search Marketing analytics look up the Analytics Setup Guide in the Help section. Remember, it’s important to upgrade your tags to take full advantage of the new enhanced tracking features. The older Conversion Counter tags will not be supported after July 2007.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer