‘The Super Cookie’ - Some Early Results
Russell has filled you in on the business advantages associated with the Super Cookie and explained the fundamental flaws with the traditional last clicks wins model. To compliment this Jack and Jon have documented the install and configuration process and given away the Super Cookie source code for free.
If you haven’t already done so have a read through both of the above posts before continuing.
Ok, so back to the data! Whilst the Super Cookie is still very much in its infancy we have been able to pilot its use on live websites and collect some early data.
The obliging guinea pig account in question was our friends at USB-Flashdrive.co.uk. In just three weeks of data here are some highlights (or lowlights depending on your perspective!):-
- In excess of 60% of all conversions involved multiple visits and multiple sources/phrases.
- In excess of 30% of all conversions were fully credited to the last referring source with no credit given to earlier introductory sources.
- In excess of 20% of all conversions were fully credited to a single phrase when multiple phrases contributed to the conversion.
- Based on the last click wins model 53% of all conversions were credited to Adwords. However, in reality Adwords played a part in more than 70% of all conversions.
The phrase “bitter sweet” springs to mind, sweet because I love having all of this additional data. Bitter because naturally now I’m questioning some of the historic decisions I’ve made based on the partial data provided by the last click wins model.
Admittedly, this is early data and I haven’t spent enough time fully dissecting the numbers but it is plainly obvious that if you’re relying on the last click wins model you’ll be making important decisions without ever accessing or understanding the steps taken by your visitors leading up to a conversion.
A sobering thought and something you’ll definitely need to be conscious of next time you log into your analytics system!
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.
This is very interesting. I’m particularly pleased that you are trying to track multiple search phrases as well as multiple sources.
At the moment so many conversions will be attributed to a brand search, when that was actually the last in a series of “general research search” > “more specific refining search” > “converting brand search” sessions.
Any light we can throw on that subject will be useful. The reporting is never going to be anything like 100% accurate, since many of those sessions could take place on different machines. I think there may be issues with the ‘user defined’ report showing data from the cookie which was present from the last session when the visitor landed as well. But some insight is VERY much better than none. Just getting some idea of the stages in the chain could be a revelation.
So thank you for sharing all of this. Including the glimpses of data in your case study — if only we could pool some more stuff like that…
Thanks for your comments Tim, I think we agree that there’s no such thing as perfect data!! But what we do have is far more accurate that any other channel. We’ll continue to refine the code and as I do more analysis I’ll add more blog posts and hopefully as you’ve mentioned the odd revelation! One thing I can say with 100% certainty is that this data has already proven to be extremely useful when making decisions about expensive adwords phrases.