1. How does ClearSaleing calculate profit?

ClearSaleing uses whatever factors you require to calculate your actual profit. Factors can include:

• Profit Margin
• Cost of Goods Sold
• Shipping
• Shipping Profit Margin
• Discounts

2. Is the profit that displays in the reports gross profit or net profit?

ClearSaleing displays net profit, the profit less the cost of the ad spend.

3. Can I see ROI for my SEO expenditures?

Yes. You can create a lead source for each engine, organic traffic and assign it a cost per day.

4. How can I tell which keywords are selling which products?

You can drill down from the keyword view into a detail view to see which actual products were purchased as a result of the keyword search. This is a valuable tool for improving ad groups, as well as making merchandising recommendations.

5. I suspect that Social Media and my other Web 2.0 endeavors are having an impact on purchases. How can I tell?

You can set up lead sources for the Social Media sites. That way you can see where these sources are appearing in the Purchase Path. Generally, what most clients see is that Social Media is often an Introducer, but not often a Closer. That is why it has been historically difficult to quantify the value of Social Media traffic.

You can also take this a step further if Social Media is driving a great deal of traffic to your site. Our Professional Services team can work with you to create a Custom Attribution Model.

6. Custom Attribution Model—what is that?

ClearSaleing offers four types of options for configuring attribution:

• ‘Even’ attributes equal credit to each step in the Purchase Path.
• ‘Custom’ allows the user to assign the weighting to each step in the Purchase Path.
• ‘Attribution Pattern’ displays the actual Purchase Paths that visitors have taken to get to your site and allows you to attribute credit to each Path. This is especially significant since you can sort by revenue or by frequency to simply attribute the accurate credit to your most popular (or most profitable) paths. ClearSaleing continues to track these Purchase Paths over time, so the system becomes even more intelligent the more data it has.
• ‘Custom Attribution Model’ is a mathematically sound algorithm that uses data teamed with some uncertainty factors to predict future visitor behavior.

7. What are Exclusions and how do they impact my ROI?

Exclusions are exceptions to the Purchase Path that you set. Exclusions are set so that non-ad factors do not ‘steal’ credit for purchases and potentially undervalue your paid ads. For example, you may want to exclude any search engine traffic with branded keywords that closed a sale since it is likely that the brand search was more navigation.

8. Is banner ad reporting based on impressions or click-throughs?

Banner ads show both impressions and click-throughs. ClearSaleing is integrated with DART DFA to show both impression and ad click through information within the Purchase Path.

9. Can ClearSaleing help me understand more about returning customers, their lifetime value and what they purchase?

ClearSaleing offers lifetime value reporting. Additional customer behavior reports answer questions, such as:

• What products are usually purchased by returning customers?
• After the first order, how long does it take for a customer to return to make a second order?
• Do returning customers spend more money per transaction than on their first order?
• Do returning customers continue to buy the same product they bought the first time?
• Do returning customers stay in the same basic category of product, or price point of their original product?

10. What is Advertising Portfolio Management?

Advertising Portfolio Management is taking a different look at your ad budget or media buys. Rather than looking at them as fixed costs determined at the time of the media plan creation, think of the buy like a financial investment portfolio. Monitor the actual performance and make decisions to shift ad spend based on performance. By focusing on the ad budget as an investment that can continuously become more efficient (and profitable), you ensure that the marketing department is a profit center.