What's a Click Worth to You? Maybe You Should Keep it a Secret

There has been some muted discussion of the drawbacks of choosing Overture's or Gooogle's own conversion tracking software to track paid search campaigns as opposed to using a third-party tracker. Some can't imagine that there could be any disadvantage to letting the engines see your ROI data. After all, don't they have privacy policies?

Searching on the topic, I turned up a post from last month on Reprise Media's weblog. Josh, Peter, et al. note that Shopping.com was seemingly able to glean the worth of different classes of clicks from advertisers who had chosen to use Shopping.com's own ROI tracking tool. Lo and behold, they came along and imposed new minimum bids in the areas that they've deemed more lucrative (thus replacing real market demand with "oughta be" market demand). For the advertisers who were enjoying the healthy ROI in some of the overlooked areas, it must have caused an immediate financial hit.

The word from Reprise is unequivocal: searchviews.com/blog/searchviews/archive/2005/01/14/263.aspx

There are plenty of ways to track your conversions. Install a tool that doesn't send your back-end data back to the same guys who are selling you the traffic.


traffick.com/2005/02/whats-click-worth-to-you-maybe-you.asp