Re: 30 day cookie for search
Richard T Nolan wrote:
>Are most sites using a 30 day cookie for their search marketing
>initiatives? I've read that only about 40% of the people that buy from
>a website make that purchase their first trip through. So it would seem
>that with search marketing the majority of sales would come on follow up
>visits. Some ecommerce sites have set a cookie to track that demand
>from return visits and some do not. What are the thoughts across the
>industry on this?
I work for a European Search Engine Marketing Company located in Hamburg and
I can assure you that it's indeed the case that the majority of sales come
on follow up visits. We did a study last year on the subject of "What
advertising impact can be achieved with text links in search engines?". To
answer this question we promoted a completely unknown new online shop for
mobile phones (www.phones-unlimited.de) exclusively using search engine
marketing and tracked all the results (clicks, conversion rates, etc.). To
be able to track them we had to use cookies which had an endless durability.
What we learned is that at this shop the immediate purchases (within 2 hours
after the click) did not make up even half of the purchases which can be
clearly and directly attributed to the search engine marketing campaign.
This means that immediate purchases only made a total of 44 % of ALL
purchases. 27% didn't purchase within 2 hours but later. The rest were 17%
online purchases excluding information about their origin (without cookie)
and 12% offline purchases by telephone.
The conclusion is: To assess the success of a search engine marketing
campaign, delayed purchases (more than two hours after the click), online
purchases without evidence of origin and offline purchases should be taken
into account beside the immediate purchases. Those values which are most of
the time not considered for the evaluation of a search marketing campaign,
made up about 56% of all purchases at the online shop!
If you're interested in receiving the whole study I can send you a link to
an English PDF with all the details.
http://www.eprofessional.co.uk/html/pressreleases/pr_study.html
Best regards,
Margit Berner
eprofessional GmbH
www.eprofessional.de
Received on Wed Jul 09 2003 - 08:51:04 CDT
