What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and…Latent Conversions
March 4th, 2008 by Joy Brazelle
If you’ve ever called my cell phone you’ve been greeted with a message to enjoy the music and then a bit of the Elvis Costello song, ‘What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding.’ It’s a great song, one of my favorites. But I have to admit that it is a bit less than a professional greeting. So I decided that I would change my message and record a more professional greeting. Or so I thought. I spent a better part of a Saturday calling my cell trying to figure it out, even going to the web site to see if there were instructions. No luck. I was confronted with a lot of confusing options and even more confusing (and useless) information on the Web site. It should not have been that difficult.
The same is true in a lot of what is being written about analytics and new reporting standards for campaigns. I’ve read a lot of articles about the new ‘Engagement Mapping’ and even as a person who has spent more than the last few years involved every day in analtyics I am confused. Basically the concept behind ‘Engagement Mapping’ is the latent conversion. Because the nature of the internet makes it so easy to do just a little more research before making a purchase or signing up to receive more information about a product, it is unlikely that you will click on an ad or search results and immediately convert.
This is not a new concept. This has always been a fact of the internet and always been information that you could get. If you search ‘latent conversions’ you will find articles that date back to 2003. Of course like everything, it is easy IF you know where to look for it.
In my experience ClickTracks has always done a good job of simply showing latent conversions in both their Search report and their Campaign report. Now you can even create a ’segment’ to break out campaigns to see the latent conversions.
Other packages offer metrics like frequency and recency that allow you to piece together information about campaigns with latent conversions.
Regardless of what tools you are using latent conversions have always been and will always be an important factor when analyzing campaigns, especially since the number and percentage of latent conversion is generally signficant.
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