Why should you go beyond the last click in your paid search audits? Director of Client Operations Donna Lagow shows why stopping at the last click is almost as awful as stopping at the last house on the left.

Transcript

A big round of applause, talking about paid search, Donna Lagow.

Next, this one. Why is last-click still a thing? Why, why, why? I know that this is something that we talk about often, but it really can’t be the last point in terms of your auditing process.

So what does that mean? You have to think multi-channel; all the attribution platforms and really even what we can find in Adwords now gives us the ability to look beyond the last click.

We can evaluate things like assisted conversions, cross-device conversions, anything that’s contributing overall to the myriad or numerous touch points that a customer may have before they actually reach that culminating last click.

Evaluating all that basically helps you look to what’s contributing at the higher funnel level and not putting off the top of your funnel. In short, that’s a classic error that we always see: “I need to get more efficient, I need to cut out 20% of spend, so I’m going to cut out everything that’s over a certain level in my CPL.”

Well, without looking across the board at what else was contributing in terms of traffic, maybe that was your second and third touchpoint to that conversion. Again, you’re creating a gap in your conversion process overall.

And lastly, you can’t preclude the website itself. So while we like to see what’s going on within performance on the PPC side, we’re obviously very interested in landing page performance as well.

But what happens after that? What happens after they start the conversion process, as they’re moving through the funnel? Are there opportunities to improve that? Is there friction that’s being created that can be taken down?

You can’t just stop at the last click on the site, either. In short, you have to keep moving all the way through the full customer journey and the experience to look for opportunities to improve the customer path. That was a big one.