Month: July 2009

By Harmit Kamboe

Having worked in search marketing for a few years, I was curious to see if there was an easy way to measure the latent impact (delayed conversion) of search marketing on online sales/consumer actions.

As marketers we sometimes forget that the prospect converts at his/her own convenience and not ours. Sometimes, the prospect may convert right away and sometimes the prospect may convert at a later date.

I was unable to find a rule of thumb on how many conversions may happen on a delayed basis. This is why I was delighted when I had the opportunity to run a campaign on Yahoo for a change instead of Google-only campaigns.

Latent Impact Data Gathering (Google versus Yahoo):
While Google adds back the “delayed” sale into the sales/conversions reported for the day that a user first clicked on to a search ad, I think Yahoo does a smarter job in this respect. Yahoo reports the sale/conversion on the actual day the “delayed” sale occurs.  This may well be 3, 4, 5 or even 30 days after the user clicked on a search ad.

In the case of Google, one has to re-run the reports to see how sales/conversions for the previous days/weeks contributed to lowering the earlier recorded Cost per Order. In addition to that, one has to download and store the historical data offline, and then compute the latent impact across several days.

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