For users of the TourCMS tour operator ecommerce platform
PPC Performance report - e.g. knowing what to pay Google per click
New report added this weekend - the PPC (Pay Per Click) Performance report.
This report lists your marketing sources (setup as agents) who, in the last 6 months, have delivered you over 50 clicks and at least 1 confirmed booking.
Setting up Google advertising tracking
* Create an agent in agent manager called Google PPC (or similar!)
* Go to tracking (next to that agent, in agent manager)
* Add a web address (e.g. the web address of your homepage - or a landing page)
* Generate tracking URL
* Add that URL as your URL in your Google advertising account (with Google)
* Any bookings made by the customer (using the TourCMS booking engine) will be (if the 365 day cookie is present) assigned to the Google agent record
The report
The report contains
* Visits (clicks) - individual clicks (not unique visitors)
* Confirmed bookings
* Sales revenue (from the confirmed bookings)
* Sales revenue per visit (click)
* Margin per visit (click)
* Number of visits required for a single booking (i.e. a look to book ratio) (normally in the 400 - 800 range for specialist tour operators)
If you are loading costs within TourCMS the margin will indicate how much you are making per booking. If you are not loading costs within TourCMS then often the margin is equal to the sales revenue (minus agent commission, but you normally don't have agent commission on PPC advertising sources)
What we are trying to do with this report is suggest that you don't bid more than the margin per click. i.e. if the report says don't bid more than 1.00 GBP per click then don't!
With the software knowing visits (clicks), confirmed bookings, sales revenue and margins we have good foundations for being able to calculate this for you.
Feedback etc appreciated.
Especially helpful if you could feedback if the report is under or over suggesting your bid prices.
This report lists your marketing sources (setup as agents) who, in the last 6 months, have delivered you over 50 clicks and at least 1 confirmed booking.
Setting up Google advertising tracking
* Create an agent in agent manager called Google PPC (or similar!)
* Go to tracking (next to that agent, in agent manager)
* Add a web address (e.g. the web address of your homepage - or a landing page)
* Generate tracking URL
* Add that URL as your URL in your Google advertising account (with Google)
* Any bookings made by the customer (using the TourCMS booking engine) will be (if the 365 day cookie is present) assigned to the Google agent record
The report
The report contains
* Visits (clicks) - individual clicks (not unique visitors)
* Confirmed bookings
* Sales revenue (from the confirmed bookings)
* Sales revenue per visit (click)
* Margin per visit (click)
* Number of visits required for a single booking (i.e. a look to book ratio) (normally in the 400 - 800 range for specialist tour operators)
If you are loading costs within TourCMS the margin will indicate how much you are making per booking. If you are not loading costs within TourCMS then often the margin is equal to the sales revenue (minus agent commission, but you normally don't have agent commission on PPC advertising sources)
What we are trying to do with this report is suggest that you don't bid more than the margin per click. i.e. if the report says don't bid more than 1.00 GBP per click then don't!
With the software knowing visits (clicks), confirmed bookings, sales revenue and margins we have good foundations for being able to calculate this for you.
Feedback etc appreciated.
Especially helpful if you could feedback if the report is under or over suggesting your bid prices.
Views: 19
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Neil Lapping on -
Hi Alex,
Firstly, thank you for an excellent decision making tool. Being able to accurately determine ROI from PPC advertising is a huge advantage.
Some feedback -
- Report is 10% higher for clicks than Adwords recorded clicks for same period.
- Also 10% higher for conversions - perhaps a result of longer cookie period?
- I really don't like the revised agent tracking page.
- It looks messy, previous layout was much better.
- Many of our landing pages are collection or single page templates. It was very useful to have all the tour, collection and single pages in the one place and easily accessible when setting up campaigns.
- Is it still possible to download a spreadsheet of all tracking links for an agent. Haven't looked closely but wasn't immediately obvious.
Improvements -
- Ability to define time period - this would make it possible to compare different periods and assess whether web or campaign changes were having negative or positive effect on conversion rates.
Other comments:
- Interesting to note that conversion rate from PPC sources is about 50% of overall website conversion rate.
- Affiliates are the lowest performing source in our case.
- Our experience backs up AdCentres claim to be the best converting PPC engine.
- Important to consider Channel Summary Report in conjunction with PPC report. 55% of our bookings over this period were by telephone/staff. As the majority of our advertising is PPC I would therefore double the sales and margin per visit in order to take account of offline conversions.
- Once again this serves to demonstrate the outstanding ROI delivered by well run and tracked PPC campaigns.
In conclusion thanks for a great report.
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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on -
Hi Neil
* Clicks - we are counting click throughs, not unique visitors from your clicks (although we have that data if it would help). Could be that the PPC sites only charge you for the first click from any user on your advert. Also sometimes they won't charge you for clicks that they consider fraudulent / spammy etc
* Conversions - yes - the TourCMS cookie is 365 days. Also new bookings made by existing customer records - assigned to an agent - will be assigned to the original agent.
* Telephone / staff - yes - you can use the enquiry API to connect your contact us form to TourCMS (and generate an enquiry & customer record). With a little extra development you can rescue the TourCMS tracking cookie information and send that in the XML API call - meaning that when the customer record is created - it is assigned to Google etc. Then, if a booking is made by a member of staff, using that existing customer record, the new booking is assigned to Google. That will pick up those ones.
Will bring the spreadsheet download back.... !
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