An accepted term?  Howabout extra-bunce for the shareholders!

But seriously, I wonder how many folk scrupoulously match their logs to their google bill...

What reporting tool are you using?

Deri

On 11:11:52 13 February 2006 mekanoid wrote:

Hi,

Is there a generally accepted term describing the difference between the number of clicks counted by a paid search outlet and the number of responses received to the corresponding landing pages.

For example, if Google charges me for 10,000 clicks however my reporting tells me I only received 8,000 Google Campaign Responses how do I describe this difference?

Thanks,

Scott

A lot of factors contirbute to the discrepancy.

It depends what tracking method you use to validate the clicks.

Whichever way you track if there is a redirect involved then you will lose a percentage of the traffic delivered by the PPC providers. You will get network congestion, you will lose a percentage there, if your target country has a propensity to dial up you will lose some there. 

If you read the TOS the suppliers have an obligation to deliver and generally speaking they do, if your site isn't ready then they will keep jamming the traffic in like the postman or milkman does if you go on holiday without telling them.

The way I look at this, the traffic you pay for is the traffic that matters. If you work out your ROI from that base then you'll be much more accurate. We stopped monitoring the traffic from tracking tools a while back and now the metrics tie up.

As for what percentage it differs, that is a real piece of string question, it depends on all of the factors above and more, if you syndicate through partner networks and AOL delivers traffic then the proxy servers can be a big factor.

Deri,

You are right the figure ought to be very high, but many advertisers have less than industrial strength hosting and analytics so couldn't tell you the figures.

As for a redirect every time, perhaps there is, certainly Google will be analysing the traffic they send in detail as will Overture.

Chinese whispers on why there will be a loss. Every extra page visited, however brief, will have a fallout. You mention typical User Journeys, which is an important metric. We spend a lot of time monitoring different publishers in terms of time on site, page views etc. 

If you have 6 steps in a "best path" and can get it to 5 then you improve the conversion rate significantly, it's why Amazon spent so much time and money perfecting their "one-click" checkout.

On 13:16:40 21 February 2006 DeriJones wrote:

Jim

Scott's question was click-through loss on the very short path (single-click) from eg Google ad to landing page - which one would hope ought to be up in 'five nines territory (99.999%)

Jim wrote:
>Whichever way you track if there is a redirect involved then you will lose a percentage of the traffic delivered by the PPC providers.

Am I right that with Google ads there's always a redirect?
Why do you say a redirect will cause a loss?

>You will get network congestion, you will lose a percentage there
If the network congestion is so bad you're losing a % of click throughs, won't you be losing the same % of pages on your site - so you'd know about the problem (or ought to...)

> if your target country has a propensity to dial up you will lose some there.

What's the mechanism you're thinking of?

>If you read the TOS the suppliers have an obligation to deliver and generally speaking they do, if your site isn't ready then they will keep jamming the traffic in like the postman or milkman does if you go on holiday without telling them.

he he - nice analogy!
There's no excuse for not 24/7 monitoring your core User Journeys right from the landing page onwards - not when you've paid money to bring those visitors in. But surprisingly few do it...

Because the number of users on your site will vary widely as you start+stop campaigns, time of the day/week, as your tech team change/add features - so does the ability of the important User Journeys on your site to give a good + fast-enough experience to users.

Deri