Web analytics shine a light on Select Comfort’s search ROI

Mattress manufacturer Select Comfort was getting online sales from its paid search listings on Google and Overture, but capturing data on web-influenced sales as well as web-transacted sales dramatically improved the calculated ROI on its keyword investment. The company works with Avenue A to select and manage its keyword listings. Using web analytics from Coremetrics Inc. to help factor in the offline sales driven by its keyword buys increased Select Comfort’s calculated ROI by a factor of 2.5 times, providing a more accurate picture of just what it was getting for what it was spending on paid search, the company reports.

Given the high-consideration nature of a mattress purchase, Select Comfort suspected that after finding its site through search and studying it, many consumers were then using a toll-free number to complete the transaction at the call center. The company decided to deploy a system that would provide dynamically generated toll-free numbers for different keyword listings, allowing it to track the keywords that lead to the most calls.

And though that analysis pushed its overall ROI up from the triple digits into the quadruple digits, it also suggested Select Comfort could do even better. Analytics showed that more than half of the total sales driven through search listings came through the call center. In addition, the average order value for web-influenced call center transactions was 39.8% higher than orders transacted purely online, due to the efforts of cross-trained agents in the call center.

As a result of Coremetrics` data analysis, Select Comfort is now reducing spending on more poorly-performing keywords and boosting keyword spending on MSN, the company reports.