The Online CMO by Philip Hallenborg

For an understanding of consideration please check previous article here.

I often come across situations where overall convergence of customers on the site suddenly goes down. Many react negatively and perceive the attractiveness of offer and pricing as the key issue.

My key message for today: if the downfall comes from consideration, and your conversion remains stable, then your issue is probably explained by a change in the distribution of your leads sources.

Most sites have a mix of leads sources in their demand generation activities.  The biggest source is typically search and banner media, followed by affiliates and some kind of internal demand generation e.g. offline advertising or email marketing.

Typically some types of leads will have lower consideration rates. For example, driving clicks using pop-under advertising (a new window is opened behind your browser screen only to be viewed when user is closing down browsers) tends to generate very low consideration as the proportion of irrelevant leads is high.

Although most people perceive a declining consideration rate as an issue, the consideration alone will not give you the full picture. In order to adequately assess the impact of a lower consideration on your business you need to a) understand if you are getting leads with lower consideration profiles and b) assess what the cost impact is (or ROI) on the low considerations leads you are driving. If the latter are more cheaper in % than the % decrease you have seen in proportionate consideration, chances are this is not bad news.