Business.comFor those of us who believe in the power of vertical search engines, Business.com has given us another reason to celebrate: Conversion Tracking for Featured Listings! I’m a fan of Business.com’s Feature Listings (big word for PPC) and was just a little excited when I happened upon this news in their help section.  Because of Business.com’s unique B2B marketplace, this conversion tracking program has some slight tweaks that help account for longer sales cycles.

Why is Business.com launching conversion tracking now?

Two reasons – the economy is forcing marketers to look more closely at ROI, and they’re realizing that the most popular web analytics tools don’t give a clear view of ROI for the business buying process.

I’ll just briefly cover some of the high-level specs for this new feature:

  • Business.com has taken extended sales cycles into account and designed their conversion tracking program around a 90 day cookie.  Most PPC programs (including AdWords and YSM) only offer a 30 day cookie, limiting the accuracy of conversion tracking for the long-term.
  • You can track keyword level ROI with by applying a “Conversion Value” to each conversion.  This isn’t earth-shattering, but it certainly adds to the appeal of the product!
  • Label and track multiple conversion events.  By this I mean, you can generate unique tracking codes for individual conversion opportunities on your website.  Break them down by leads, sales, pageviews, etc. – the possibilities are endless.  This is much like Google’s Conversion Actions feature, and is extremely helpful for segmenting data.
  • The Conversion Tracking feature isn’t out of BETA yet, so if you are interested – you need to contact your Business.com rep, call them directly or  apply to the BETA directly.

Business.com Conversion Tracking