SES NYC Session: Web Analytics & Measuring Success

Published by Ben | Filed under SEM / E-marketing, SEO

Always a hot topic for us web site marketers, analytics & measurement was a pretty good session, but didn’t really break any ground for me personally. Good examples and practices were espoused throughout.

Conference regular, and a personal favorite of mine, Stacy Williams delivered a comprehensive run-down of integrating analytics with campaigns and used examples from her own site and a pro-bono client. The key highlight was “avoiding the Spaz factor”. This is something just about every marketer is familiar with - you get a report without any context, it shows a ‘drop’ of some sort, and everyone ’spazzes’ as a result. She gave some great tips including using historical data asa back drop. This has always been a favorite tactic of mine because without fail - there are days/weeks/months that campaigns regularly experience a drop off. With historical data - you can see that traffic always drops over the holidays and that there’s no need to “spaz”.

Additional key takeaways, and something that we regularly practice at Amplify-Interactive, is evaluating and establishing site KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) ONLY after evaluating a site and it’s goals. Another couple pieces of practical advice: don’t let past measurements influence what you measure now, and don’t measure things you can’t act on.

So many times we begin work with an organization and find that they are reporting on either entirely useless numbers, or on numbers that they can’t act on or do anything about. Again, nothing new to us, but judging by the reaction of the people sitting next to me - this was an absolutely revolutionary concept.