Yahoo!’s Conversion Tracking Measures Assists

As in soccer Yahoo! now gives credit due for search terms that even though they didn’t produce a conversion or sale they will be accounted for as an “assist”. So if your top performing search terms is producing a poor CPA (Cost Per Action/Conversion) from not scoring enough goals, you could consider assists as a new metric. This feature is part of the new upgrade of Yahoo! and is only available to accounts that have been upgraded and you must run the “Keyword Performance” report. You will notice a column labeled “Assists” that should contain a number value of how times the search term helped with the conversion process.

How does Yahoo! know this term assisted in the selling process? It’s a well-known fact from live testing that people use multiple searches to find what they are looking for. For example, say you are looking for a leather bound address book for a birthday gift and are rather new at using the search engines for shopping. A typical first search term you may enter would be “address book”. A broad search term such as this will often return limited results that specifically mention leather address books in the top results. They click on your ad which lands them to a web page that shows lots of various types of address books, later the web searcher or prospect returns to the Yahoo! search site to continue shopping around. This time they are a bit more educated and have added “leather address book” to narrow in their search.

As a smart advertiser, you are bidding on both the broad and detailed terms for "address books" and so when they search by that refined term a new ad appears that is dedicated to your line of leather address books. This time you convert the prospect into a sale. The original search gets credit for an assist and the second term gets a recorded conversion. I like this new view into search behavior and it has me thinking up ways to develop a new formula for measuring the ROI of the top terms to help refine my bidding strategy.