CSE Best Practices: Click-to-Profit Tracking

By Glen Hamilton

Let's talk tracking. This is the third of our initial nine posts on Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) marketing best practices.

Data feed marketers manage to ROI benchmarks. Often those benchmark metrics are ROAS (return on ad spend), CPA (cost per [customer] acquisition), CPO (cost per order) or ad spend as a percent of sales. Some savvy marketers may even consider gross profit return on ad spend, life time value or return on inventory calculations. These are all common, useful, retail channel and direct marketing measures.

Cost that click as it happens

Tracking referred sales is easily accomplished (to varying degrees of accuracy) with web analytic tools. Tracking line item (invoice level) order detail for referred orders is more difficult, but yet it's certainly possible to do with a variety of solutions. Tracking and costing real-time CPC ad spend (click costs) is basically impossible without a platform like Mercent Retail.

Marketers tend to rely on pulling ad spend reports from the reporting system of each channel and periodically trying to reconcile channel ad spend to tracked orders. It's possible to do this reconciliation at a high level such as a per shopping channel ROAS analysis, but it is typically very difficult or impossible to do it on a per click level.

Match the cost of the clicks to the ROI generated

In other words, if a merchant wants to know the daily average ROAS of referrals (clicks) from a single or a set of product listings on Shopping.com, it's not possible to get that information today with off-the-shelf analytics. You need to use a specialty product such as Mercent Retail Analytics. 

One of the key reasons why this is important is that in order to make the conversion data from data feed shopping channels actionable you need to match the cost of the clicks with the value of the conversions they affected... matching click cost to conversion value as those events happen (in near real-time). By doing this you can automate the management of your data feed business. Without this, you will always be 'a day late and a dollar short', or typically several days late and many dollars lost in inefficient CPC ad spend management.

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