Some conversion rates are easy to measure - your site got 100 visitors from Yahoo! today and 3 of them bought your widget - a 3% conversion rate. Others, however can be very difficult to find. Promediacorp at SEW posts a question about the price of links and it soons turns into a conversation about how to track the untrackable clicks (and calls).

Promediacorp deals in the rough & tumble business of real estate in NYC. Unlike some other areas of the country, NYC requires that every listing be available to every broker, making the real estate playing field very even and very competitive. Promediacorp notes that although they have high rankings and spend thousands each day in PPC, they can't track their conversion rates because conversions often happen to a private cellphone of an agent, an e-mail, etc. Since you can't ask every client, "how did you find us?" and get an accurate or useful response, the problem escalates.

Working in the financial side of real estate with one of our clients (the oft-mentioned Avatar Financial Group), I know that we track clicks to and through the site, then seperate out the calls by using unique 1-800 numbers, a recommendation that Ian makes in the thread. This process allows us to see how many inquiries come via the web vs. print and word of mouth, but it does little to narrow down where the click originated. This stumbling block required that we come up with a creative solution - PPC and SEO testing. We shut down PPC for a week at Adwords, then Overture and tracked different responses. We recorded each call, e-mail and web visit and compared the data to get solid ROI numbers. We also were able to do this recently with organic listings when Avatar was mistakenly banned from Yahoo! and then re-included 10 days later. The data from those dates gives us a good idea how much call and conversion traffic Yahoo! was sending.

It's important to be creative and attentive to small metrics when dealing with a low conversion rate, high value product like real estate or financial services. This kind of contract can be extremely tough to work with unless you're equipped to deal with all of the nuances and hurdles of the hard-to-track clicks.