Particularly in this time of multi-screen research and shopping, booking and ordering, where it’s often hard to place a user’s paid visit on mobile to a sale received on a work PC, for example, you may want to justify investment in mobile and in some shorter tail keywords. These often appear not to directly convert to the primary KPI (revenue raising or lead generation).

Just to clarify, this is NOT attribution as such, since we are not dealing with individual conversion paths nor is this article intending for use in attributing to different digital channels. I personally do recommend embellishing your user behavior information beyond this method by also setting up cross channel tracking – in my agency, we have our own self-built system for clients to do this – but you will need to find a specialist tracking provider that’s best for you.

So the way go beyond just monitoring primary conversions is to track all possible actions a user can make on your site that indicate engagement. This does two key things:

• You can assign value to these actions using users’ overall behavior patterns
• You can accurately segment users by their actions for powerful remarketing approaches

For the actions, look at your own site and see what a user can to in terms of interacting either with the site or with your company. Here are a few examples:

• Call you
• Send a contact form
• Submit a comment on a blog post
• Submit a review
• Join a mailing list
• Download a file
• Use a social follow button

If you collate all these actions centrally already, you can compare the actions with sales and establish a ratio of these to sales. So if every 100 mailing lists, you see 3 sales, you can assign each mailing list sign up 3% of a sale’s revenue.

When you add up all the value of these interactions plus the direct conversion revenues, you could find some keywords or mobile traffic are worth significantly more to your business that just looking at direct sales from those clicks.

You can also take this further by segmenting this data by things like time of day, day of week, location of the user and, if you know it, demographic information.

In addition, you can up the existing action-to-sale ratio by getting more value out of non-converting users through the medium of remarketing. Leveraging the granularity of the data – knowing a user has performed a specific action without converting – is something you can build into the messaging and assist with targeting.

From a marketer’s perspective, it helps justify budgets and helps you direct your budget more effectively as well as helping set bid levels across devices and keywords. From a business perspective, it gives you much more insight beyond just PPC but also to understand if you need to make changes to your mobile experience to increase engagement by comparing these interactions on mobile vs desktop.

This approach is an important piece of the puzzle if we’re to really drive value in the mobile space, which in search, at least, is pushing PC traffic aside.