Imagine you go to a rugby match at Twickenham, it’s the Guinness UK Final. Both teams are sponsored by Guinness and have the Guinness logo printed on their shirts, the referee is also sponsored by Guinness and even the ball has the Guinness logo printed on it. All around the stadium are Guinness billboards and the big stadium TV screen shows Guinness adverts. You even get a Guinness flag to wave during the match.

After the game is finished you walk from the stadium down the road on either side of you are Guinness billboards. You decide to stop for a quick pint so you go into the nearest pub and the barman is wearing a Guinness t-shirt. Finally you decide to buy yourself a pint of (you guessed it) Guinness.

Winning strategy - buy more bar staff more Guinness t-shirts?

Using ‘last click wins’ your marketing strategy would be to buy more bar staff more Guinness t-shirts.

After all that was the last thing the customer saw before they converted so that’s what counts right? Wrong. Of course we know this isn’t the case, clearly all of the other advertising you were exposed to had a direct impact on you and played an important role in persuading you to buy that pint of Guinness.

Last Click Wins

A Forrester Research study shows the vast majority of marketing managers are still using ‘last click wins’ to measure the success of their online marketing and website sales.

In other words most of you are planning on buying more Guinness t-shirts for more bar staff as your giving all your credit for sales to the last click the user makes before converting! This idea of ‘last click wins’ is the defacto standard in the web world even though we all know it doesn’t make sense.

Moving on from ‘last click wins’

The latest web analytics software packages are slowing starting to tackle this problem. The major vendors are looking at smarter ways to track the full user journey that customers make in the weeks or months leading upto a sale.

ConversionWorks has now adapted the Google Analytics tracking cookie to do exactly this – using our new Super Cookie we’re able to record all of the visits a customer makes leading up to the purchase

In practice this means we go from seeing this (with the normal Google Analytics Cookie):

To seeing this with the new the ConversionWorks ‘Super Cookie’:

The Google Analytics Super Cookie

The Google Analytics Super Cookie turns any normal Google Analytics account (which would typically just record the last click) into a super account that tracks all the visits made by a specific customer leading up to conversion.

The benefit comes in being able to get a more realistic picture of your visitors behaviour leading up to a sale and most importantly being able to track what marketing campaigns (PPC, price comparison, banner ads etc) they had been exposed to and acted on prior to the purchase.

Super Cookie - FREE how-to-guide and source code

In the coming week we will be releasing a blog article and the source code for the ConversionWorks Super Cookie. We will also give you a full installation guide.

In return all we’re asking for is your feedback on how the new improved cookie is working and the results your getting. Please leave your feedback on our blog posts.

Using the Super Cookie to improve your Adwords campaigns

The Super Cookie technology is pretty cool but the real benefit comes from getting a much better understanding of your Adwords campaigns and being able to rapidly improve their performance.

Our next blog post will be a case study on how we’ve already used the Super Cookie to better understand our Adwords campaigns and significantly improve their performance (£££’s).

Commercial Services – would you like to start tracking the full referral path of your campaigns?

As a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant we can help you better understand and manage your Adwords marketing using the Super Cookie.