Tracking Return on Investment Using GoToast

This article deals with a very specific kind of model of web sales. The model is one in which your web site’s primary focus is generating leads, not sales. Industries such as travel, vacation, timeshare, and many others simply use their web site to produce leads. Most all of the time they have to speak to the web visitor before the sale is made. This particular article deals with a method of tracking ROI with this scenario in mind.

With the reports many of the PPCSE’s give us online it is very easy to see which terms are producing the most visitors, but it is another issue as to whether you can track those that turn into sales. For instance, using the tools that Overture provides I can see how many clicks term “XYZ” generated and what the cost was per click. But how can we know if a particular term was responsible for generating a lead? Using GoToast, an excellent tool for managing your PPC accounts, we can use their Profit Builder ROI Tool and track this very data. By appending your PPC links with GoToast’s tracking URL Data and using their JavaScript code on your pages you can easily generate reports on conversion for each term.

Here’s how it works: GoToast provides you with some code Java code that goes on your keyword entry page and some that goes on your registration confirmation page. You will then add information after the link you have setup in the PPC engine.

Lets say the my normal link is as follows:

www.yourcompany.com/

The GoToast tracking data would go on the end of the link and contain a code for the search engine and the keyword, as follows:

www.yourcompany.com/?GTSE=OVER&GTKW=your+keyword

Notice how the keywords are separated by a “+” if there is more than one in your search phrase.

Once your links have been converted and the code entered into your site, GoToast will know track the keyword, engine, and whether or not they hit your registration confirmation page.

Once we have our reporting we can now tell if a keyword is actually generating leads. By using these reports we can scale back the spending on the terms that are just generating lookers vs. actual prospects.

In my personal experience using a tool like GoToast to track conversions to leads well pays for an expense encountered from the tool itself. GoToast has varying price plans and offers many other features besides ROI tracking, but this is definitely one of the most money saving tools they have. One final note, do not expect to get 100% accurate results, these results give a picture that’s 90% accurate, much better than the nothing we had before using this tool. Due to the nature of the web, from the browser to the web host it is nearly impossible to get 100% accurate figures all the time. For instance lets say someone visits your site using a 3.0 browser that does not support JavaScript, that person one not be tracked by the system. Likewise some search engines or web server’s strip out URL tracking information, another reason this tracking might fail. All in all this is a very reliable system and when tested in the real world, proves that the numbers are extremely accurate even if not 100%. For more information on tracking ROI please view our ROI Chart and Tracking Formula.