What counted as a conversion?

Years ago, I started questioning a retargeting program our ecommerce and marketing department was running. I was looking at it from operations, trying to understand whether the spending made sense.

As I remember it, the department kept increasing the budget because the numbers coming back from the provider looked good. The provider was claiming credit for nearly half of some days’ sales.

That didn’t make sense to me. I knew what our daily sales had been doing before we started using them. How much of that business were these ads actually bringing in?

So I contacted our representative and asked how they were counting the revenue.

They explained that if an ad was served to someone and that person later bought something from our store, the purchase could be attributed to the campaign. They didn’t have to click the ad.

My first question was about people who were already our customers. What about someone who was going to come back and buy anyway?

I could see how increasing the budget could lead to more ads being served and more purchases getting counted. But that still left the question of how much additional business we were getting.

There was a separate report for purchases that followed an actual click. I had to dig for it, but once I found it, that became the measure I used to evaluate performance. I also asked for changes to the attribution settings and reduced the budget.

Then I started looking at what else we could do with that money.

What we were spending made it worth considering an employee who could handle retargeting along with our Google, Bing and Yahoo ads. We could build that capability inside the company.

I reduced the vendor budget while we made that transition. Eventually, we brought the work in-house and stopped using the provider.

The business continued to grow.