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Calculating the Cost of Email Complaints Generated by Your PPC Leads |
 As we've been discussing in this column, the quality of the leads you generate via your pay-per-click campaign will have a direct influence on your email deliverability when you start emailing to these people. This leads to an interesting question that a reader asked, "How do I quantify the cost of a email complaint in my PPC tracking?"
Click here to download an example showing two different PPC campaigns resulting in very different email complaint rates (5% vs 12%) and the radically different adjusted lead costs that result (PDF 176KB). To use this method to track the cost of PPC leads who hit the spam complaint button when they receive your email campaigns, here's what you'll need:
1) Start with the following 1 week results:
a. The revenue generated from delivering your email messages
b. Your PPC direct lead cost (how much you spend in PPC to get the lead)
c. The number of leads generated
2) Adjust the lead cost to include deliverability costs. To include deliverability costs you’ll need to make some assumptions about how many email complaints it takes to get bulked (put in the spam folder). Here are some good starting numbers - if your overall complaint rate (complaints/emails sent)* is greater than 1% you'll likely encounter issues. Also, if you hit an absolute number of complaints over 5000 you’ll likely have issues. Most ISPs and Inbox providers take both complaint rates and absolute complaint number into account when making filtering decisions.
*(ISPs usually calculate this by complaints/email_in_inbox, however, this measure is a good proxy)
3) Make an assumption about how long bulking will last when you’re receiving excessive complaints - for many senders this tends to be one week for a 1% complaint rate, two weeks for a 2% complaint rate, and six weeks for a 3% complaint rate.
4) Measure how much revenue you lose during the bulking time - often this is over 90% for many senders.
5) Add your complaints from PPC to your complaints from the rest of your list (remember the receiving ISP doesn’t know the difference) to get your ‘blended’ complaint rate. If the blended complaint rate is high enough to trigger bulking (i.e. over 1%) you can work out the cost and tie it back to your PPC lead cost.
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if you’d like a spreadsheet calculator that makes it easy to plug in your own business's numbers to work out your PPC complaint deliverability cost.
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