Going beyond CPC ad metrics to cost per acquisition

Online retailers should go beyond figuring cost-per-click in web advertising to cost-per-acquisition, Ram Srinivasan, president and CEO of Fireclick Inc. will say at next week’s eTail 2004 Conference. "CPA will become more important once the euphoria over CPC has worn out and people come back to business sense in what it means to have revenue-producing traffic," he says.

Srinivasan will speak about marketing and web site analysis strategies in a session titled "Moving Beyond CPC to What Retailers Really Need: CPA" at 2:50 p.m., Feb. 24, at the eTail Conference in Palm Springs, CA.

"It’s not just about web site traffic, but qualified traffic," he says. "It’s an evolution from awareness building to building profitable traffic and measuring cost per acquisition."

Among the methods retailers will use to measure CPA, he adds, is to benchmark their sales conversion rates stemming from marketing programs against the results of others in their market. Fireclick provides such benchmarking data in anonymous reports on its own customer base, he adds.

Srinivasan will also discuss best practices in marketing budgets and clickstream analysis. He says that clickstream analysis should be considered more useful for optimizing site image displays than for understanding an individual visitor’s shopping behavior.