Hi, I have just installed Piwik and I have found it amazing! Congratulations on building something so useful to the general public - I was probably going to give it a go myself if I didn’t find Piwik, great work!
Tracking Adwords - why analytics doesn’t do a good job!
In the PPC market there is a big need to track Adwords properly. Analytics does a so-so job at the moment, the main limitation being that it is not customisable and you, the webmaster have no control over the data.
PPC management products by Webtrends, Hitbox, Dcstorm etc are basically 80% analytic and 20% bid management. Their advantage is that they can track clicks, keywords and goals properly and so they are able to make bid management variations. For example with the keyword blue sofa, if I am getting a ROI of 400% (above my target) then I would decide that I need to spend more money on this keyword than others not performing so well.
Bid management system using Piwik and Adwords:
I wonder if any of you had customized Piwik to be more than just an analytics platform but actually something that takes care of PPC optimization? This would save precious money to clients and people like me that run a PPC agency and don’t want to give away 5-10% of my client’s marketing spending to PPC bidding systems that basically have a great analytics software and not so great learning algorithms to adjust bidding values.
The secret is to track ROI properly getting the analytics package to follow:
- basket value
- number of page impression per visits
- location of the clicks
- order value distribution (analytics works only with last click wins)
- keyword performance
e.g. I want to know “red sofa” keywords’ ROI for UK visitors that get to the site via a PPC ad (from a campaign X and adgroup Y) and end up buying later via direct traffic. What I want to be able to do is to assign some weight to the first time they came on the site via PPC and some weight to direct traffic. DC storm does a decent job at this allowing the web marketer. E.g. you can assign to PPC a 50% of the revenue and direct another 50%.
So if I have spent £2500 over a keyword “red sofa” that sold £5k worth of products over a given period of time, where 100% of the visitors came via PPC and they all went to buy later by typing the site URL in their browser. Then my ROI for PPC is:
((return / weight) / purchase) - Investment = ROI
((5000 / (100/2)) / 2500) - 2500 = 0
The system would need to integrate with Adwords to make bid adjustments, and get all this inputs to work out via a Bayesian statistics algorithm to find the best way to increase my bid to get a high ROI.
At the end of the day, clients care about profits!
I think if we get piwik to be fast enough it could be great ! I think there are some scalability issues at moment.
So if you have worked on something similar or you would like to get involved please get in touch. I have worked in the industry for a while and I am happy to share my knowledge.
Frank Vitetta (info at wordsfinder dot com )