Bonus Points for Omniture
Unbeknownst to me, last week as I was testing out this new installation of WordPress blogging software, a post I made which referenced Omniture would make its way into a few blog feeds and someone from Omniture would actually take notice — and better yet, take action. In the post, I indicated some frustration with the UI and setting up reporting and that I was considering giving Clickshift.com a try at SEM needs. Today I received a call from our SearchCenter contact and we talked through some of the details of the post and he showed me how to create some business rules to solve a problem I was having.

In the business of tracking: clicks -> conversions to free samples -> offline sales
I explained that my goal right now, since we do not sell products via our website, was to maximize the conversions from visitor to free sample ordering. From the sample ordering data we collect, we can determine the percentage of sample orders that convert into offline purchasers. Fortunately for our business model, we sell custom products, which means orders are placed directly with us, regardless of retailer. The manufactured blind makes its way to the consumer, so we can simply match the shipping address of a product order against our database of addresses we collect for free sample ordering. (All of this is obviously done under our privacy policy and consumer data is kept under lock & key.)

Ahhh…the cost/conversion metric I had been looking for
Anyway, since we do not sell products online, we thus have no online revenue to track, which makes some of the default reporting within Omniture’s SearchCenter product useless to us — in particular ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). What I am looking to do is reduce our cost per conversion (cost per swatch order). This metric did require our account rep to setup a custom setting on his end to enable us to better report against it, but at the end of the call, I had cost/conversion reporting setup and was on my way to creating business rules for our search engine bids.

FWIW, cost/conversion is a default metric available in Google’s free web analytics. It seems like somewhat of an oversight to omit this metric from the default reporting, but I guess that Omniture’s clients typically are e-commerce businesses that rely on ROAS metrics since they have online revenue to also inject into reporting (at which point cost/conversion is less critical).

Herein lies the delimma: OPTIMIZING keyword campaigns on cost per conversion
Clickshift.com’s model automatically optimizes entire campaigns based on keywords that drive the best cost per conversion. Additionally, Clickshift.com also optimizes based on landing page.

Omniture’s system is not so automated or all-encompassing (yet). Omniture’s reporting is able to TELL me what keywords are driving for cost/conversion, but only through arbitrary automated increments (that I specify based on no data/research) can I enforce increases or decreases in bid spending. Furthermore, Omniture’s support for A/B(/C/D/E…n) landing pages is a little more involved that Clickshift. Technically, it can be done, but requires tagging pages specifically, and doesn’t really offer the complete solution that Clickshift.com is selling businesses on. I would have to separately test landing pages and keyword campaigns and assemble my own findings between the two. I can’t just automatically disable landing pages or move my bids to another style of landing page automatically. Omniture’s business rules currently allow one action to be taken at a time…and landing pages can only be manually changed.

Net/Net: I’ll make further attempts at creating additional business rules (within Omniture) for bid automation based on average ad position, cost/conversion, and other criteria I deem necessary. We’ll see how much further I can drive down cost/conversion. And I’m very pleased at the level of customer service from Omniture.