The TRUTH About Visitor Value & Keyword Value
Damn.
I get SO SICK of the B.S. that marketers tout about “knowing your visitor value metric” when they talk about advertising budgets.
All of them speak using generalizations about calculating your lifetime visitor value – and then projecting off of that to calculate what your advertising budget should be.
In reality, THERE IS NO WAY TO CALCULATE KEYWORD VALUE INDEPENDENTLY OF THE SOURCE THE VISITOR CAME FROM.
Keyword value etc. is a bunch of crap. The source of the traffic is an interwoven part of the keyword value – and I mean more than just “it’s Google traffic”.
IP Location, referrer site, even TIME OF DAY, is CRITICAL in calculating TRUE keyword value.
So the next time you look at your tracking and notice that most of your converting traffic comes from “cool tshirts” (or whatever) don’t assume you’ll be able to use that conversion metric to increase your profit by PAYING or ROLLING OUT for more traffic.
You could be unpleasantly surprised to discover the “open throttle” PPC conversion metric is MARKEDLY WORSE.
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