On ways to measure search engine marketing success and what statistic you should care about.

This session at the Search Engine Strategies in New York was moderated by Allan Dick from Vintage Tub & Bath. Laura Thieme opened the show, but since her presentation was a little bit more technical will start with the beginners’ introduction to web metrics here:

Stacy Williams, Managing Partner of Prominent Placement Inc. talked under the headline “Using Web Analytics to Measure Your SEM Success.”

Why measure?

Why measure? Stacy Williams asked. The answer: Web analytics can prove that your search engine marketing strategy works as planned.

“SEM is strategy and planning,”” she said. Web analytics can prove that your SEM strategy works as planned. Is it driving visitors to your site? Is it persuading visitors to take the desired actions? Web metrics will help you answer these questions.

Competences

What competences are needed to make use of Web analytics? Not that much, Williams said. You should be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers, and you should be familiar with Excel.

The most important KPIs

Next question: What measures are the most important for tracking search and site success?

It depends, Williams said. You do not necessarily need the same key performance indicators (KPIs) for business to customer relationships (B2C) as for B2B (business to business). Publishers differ from retailers, big brands from boutiques, established companies from start-ups. It is all relative.

There are two critical questions you have to ask yourself:

1. What do you want to know? Identify the metrics that have a significant impact on the
2. What are you going to do with it? You should only measure and report on metrics that you will act on, she said.

Because of this you need to have a clear understanding of the main objectives of your organization. Key stakeholders in your organization must agree upon the KPIs that support these goals and objectives.

Williams warned the audience not to worry too much about what your competitors use” “They may not be behaving rationally. We spend more time worrying about our business,” she said.

Start small

So where do you start? Williams’ answer was simple: “Start small – do a little, learn a lot! Start with a simple [web statistics] package and learn from it. If you need to upgrade then upgrade.”

Avoid analysis paralysis

“Set a time to look at your reports,” she said. “Avoid analysis paralysis. Focus on actionable data. Maintain a diary and create a checklist. Don’t rely on one number or snapshot. You need to see trends!”

Among the KPI she would focus on were:

• Search engine saturation, i.e how many pages have been indexed
• In-bound links
• Visibility on first page results
• Search engine traffic

Then overlay the data with when it was optimized, or order to determine causality. You may for instance see how an increase in the number of back links generate more search engine traffic etc. – i.e. you will see how one metric affects another.

Trend is your friend

“Trend is your friend,” she said and asked the listeners to look at seasonality. November and December may for instance bring in holiday donations or sales.

You cannot control holidays. The world cup can cause a drop in traffic. Be aware of the local culture in the country you are targeting.

“Ignore the daily or weekly ups and downs,” she said. “Look at the long terms!”

Other KPIs of importance she mentioned were:

• Bounce rate. One page visitors are normally not interested in what you have to offer. It can for instance be that you accidentally rank high for irrelevant terms. People are normally not reading site descriptions in Google. They are clicking anyway. Others may be using your site as a Rolodex card: They look for contact information.
• Average page views
• Average time on site
• Conversions

“Only 6 percent of our searchers are actively using the search terms we are targeting,” Williams said. “That’s a very healthy number. You cannot make your site invisible for search terms you are not targeting.”

“Take information and turn it into insight,” Williams argued. “Numbers are great but the client needs the story behind the numbers! Test, test, and test and improve what’s working and eliminate what isn’t.”

At the end of her presentation she recommended relevant books by authors like Eric Peterson, http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/ Jim Sterne, Bryan Eisenberg and Jim Novo. www.futurenowinc.com
She also recommended resources like Marketing Sherpa
and eMarketer.

Laura Thieme

Speaker Laura Thieme, president and founder og Bizresearch, argued that web analytics is all about proving value. “Is search delivering?” she asked. “Are there leads, sales, at a loss, at a profit?”

Can you track to the campaign level, ad group level keyword level, or to the product or the service? Can you track organic versus paid? What does your matrix look like?

Document ROAS

You need to provide more than visibility and traffic reports. You need to document ROAS (return on ad spend), she said.

However, it is not easy to determine if you truly get a return on investment using KPIs. You have, for instance, to distinguish between cost per order and cots per action, great profit and net profit, leads form organic search results vs. paid advertising.

Accurate data

Another important question according to Thieme is “Do you have the data and is it accurate?”

Without tracking strings that are updated an accurate, this report in your web analytics data will not be accurate.

Her team would be delivering ranking reports every two weeks, and would also track spider/robot activity.

“If you are not ranked, go back to the spider reports and see how often they come to each page,” she said. You can predict how many days it will take to get indexed in Google. As for her own blog, Laurathieme.com she noticed that MSN indexed it first. Google indexed it last although it was the first to visit. It took weeks for her blog to go live in Google.

Nettracker

Using the Nettracker keyword referrals it is very easy to see whether or not your ads or organic listings are driving valuable traffic at the keyword level, she said. The Nettracker tool makes it easy to find what the people are doing; giving you good funnel reports and path analysis. You can see what pages are causing people to progress to the pages you want them to see.

We statistics may bring surprises. She had found that the case studies at Bizresearch were popular. She didn’t expect that.

Find out what is persuading people to buy

It is important to find out what is persuading people to buy, she said. Clicktracks Pro will visually demonstrates the power of some pages over other. She had noted that the bizresearch blog was a top traffic driver but was not persuading people to buy. The blog had attracted searchers who were not directly interested in the main topic of the site. Why? The blog had mentioned terms like “Emperors of the ice,” and “suddenly slimmer”.

She pointed out that web analysis is very time consuming. Companies should therefore invest in it as a stand alone service. As she said: “Tracking is like soling crossword puzzle and not everyone is good at that.”

She stressed that it is important that the company spend time discussing the findings. Client side interpretation is important.

Other products and services mentioned by Thieme:

Omniture
Coremetrics
Webtrends
Hitbox
Google analytics
Clicktracks

Her team often used three tools together.

More of Pandia’s Search Engine Strategies coverage.