Return on Intention

This week in a meeting a client asked for us to take over their adwords accounts. Their fear is that their bounce rate from those campaigns are too high.

For the most part, this client has great organic traffic for their core offerings, so their adwords campaigns are focused on targeting markets that could benefit from their services, but who are searching for different means to solve their problems. Not a bad strategy, overall.

The problem can arise that if you drive traffic to your website to show the user a different solution that what they we’re looking for the bounce rate can be very high. Many users will see that what they searched for is not exactly what is on the page and immediately hit the back button. In this case the clients fears were justified.

So whats the right course of action? Shut down or reduce the budget on the campaigns because they don’t produce a good conversion rate? That defiantly would reduce the advertising budget without  reducing the overall number of measurable conversions. Normally that sounds great, especially in this age of accountability, but there is an underlying problem here. Sometimes the conversions cycle is so long that you can’t track it.

When we asked this client about their users and how they come to start using the program the organization offers, the most common story is “I heard about you guys, but tried other means of reaching my goals. After they all fail and I realize that there is no magic bullet to solve my problems, then I remember you guys and get signed up.” The average time between first being exposed to this client and the end user signing up for their services is 3 to 5 years. If their initial exposure to the brand is online (which most often it is) and then it takes 3 to 5 years for a “conversion”, how do you measure that? Answer: You can’t.

This is very similar to the argument of direct advertising over brand advertising. Most often you can’t directly measure how well a branding campaign works. Good branding can influence behavior, but it happens over time. On the web we like to think that everything can be measured, and we can tie it all to ROI. If something isn’t performing in black and white numbers by the end of the month, we kill the program. Unfortunately, we can’t measure everything, and we can tie less to ROI that we wold like to believe. As in this case, with a cycle of 3 to 5 years, we can’t measure it accuratly, and definatly not by the end of the month.

If we look at their bounce rate and the cost it has on their conversion rate, we would cancel the program. That’s what the numbers tell us to do. But what the customers? The people who are behind all the numbers tell us if we stop the campaigns then that initial exposure won’t exists. Without that exposure, their unmeasurable conversion cycle could be disrupted, and we wouldn’t know it for 3 to 5 years.

Number are numbers. They don’t tell us to do anything. Its the interpretation of the numbers that has meaning. Make sure your brand story and customer perspectives are taken into account when “Reading the Numbers”.