Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics Are Made for Each Other

This is a follow up piece to “Web Analytics Strategy – Part 1: Making the Most of your Web Analytics” and “Web Analytics Strategy – Part 2: Analyze Your Results”

Once you have met with your stakeholders and decided on goals (see part 1).  And once you have created a review schedule to measure those goals (see part 2).  A common first place many people start is to understand how well their website is performing in search.  Keyword ranking is where most people start, but as they come to understand how organic search works and what the factors involved are, many of them start looking at a wider range of metrics. Reporting becomes more complex and critical for success.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) are two of the best examples of how to use Web analytics to improve your website’s and your business’s performance.  Search engine marketing (SEM) and Web analytics are made for each other. Once you understand how search marketing metrics work, you will have insight into almost every key measurement aspect of any online marketing program.

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Got a Web Analytics Strategy?  Get Ready for Some Numbers!

This is a follow up piece to “Web Analytics Strategy – Part 1: Making the Most of your Web Analytics”

I was recently discussing a campaign with a client.  We were going through the campaign strategy and what was working and where improvements could be made and listing off all the next steps that we would take.  The conversation itself was a hour long just to talk through results.  After the meeting, he had to run off to another meeting for a different project.  Then he had another meeting after that.  In any given day, his day is 80% full of meetings!  When does he ever have time to think?!

Most business decision makers are involved in a lot of decisions.  The decision process takes time and understanding.  Very few have as much time as they’d like to sit down and really dig through campaign response metrics.  Practically none of the marketers I know have the time to do the deep work that is required to thoroughly analyze under-performing programs.

Web Analytics Best Practices – Properly Analyze Your Results

Once the goals have been decided and everyone is ready to get started, the next step in having a successful analytics strategy is to figure out who is going to review and analyze the numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

Making the Most of Your Web Analytics

Every organization that has a website, regardless of size, should know what that website is contributing to the business.  Analytics reports are designed to help you see that. However, knowing what information you need your analytics report to tell you is most important.  Building a Web analytics strategy to help uncover those key performance indicators and design reports that tell you what you need to know is the best first step in making the most of your analytics package.

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At Amplify Interactive, we look at statistical history when drawing comparisons to current analytic and pay-per-click numbers.  The search behavior of the world populace is a wild and wacky one; there are dips and gains.  Most of the time, you can predict lower or higher search volume for any given month for an industry-set of search terms by looking at the previous years’ data (I stress “most of the time” here because sometimes it does not line up that way).

Comparing Last Month to This Month Doesn’t Give You the Big Picture

That being said, it’s nothing new for a client of ours to request a comparison of data of this month to last month.  So, for example, we would get a request to compare March numbers to February.  While I understand the desire to see this comparison (”Did we improve month-to-month?”), this measure doesn’t tell us a whole heck of a lot about whether we’re seeing improved site traffic / PPC numbers / etc.  Why doesn’t this month-to-month comparison work very well?

Yearly search trends for “homes for sale” – follows a fairly close yearly pattern

Look at the example above. If you were to compare November to December without looking at yearly data comparisons, you’ll wonder why December looked more positive for your PPC and analytics numbers.  Looking at things yearly, you can see that almost every year that’s quite a search volume increase for “homes for sale” from November to December.

Obviously, a lot of other factors may come into play about why you had gains / losses for your site analytic key performance indicators (KPIs) or your PPC stats.  These factors may include:

• Organic search rankings
• Paid search rankings
• Offline marketing initiatives (look for increases / decreases in ‘direct traffic’ referrals)
• Click fraud instances effecting your PPC campaign, boosting your bounce rate and lowering your average time spent on site / page views per visit metrics
• Other elements (your site traffic may dip during the NCAA basketball tournament, perhaps major news events affect search behavior, news about more help for first-time home buyers may boost real estate-type search queries, etc.)

Look at the Big Picture

To sum it up, don’t short-change your site analytic or PPC performance comparisons.  If you’re providing month-to-month comparisons, that’s fine – but look at the big picture when providing analysis.  Look at historical performance and compare time frames from year-to-year to see if there’s a upward (or downward) trend.  Think about other factors like whether their organic search ranking presence improved or if an offline marketing initative was launched.  Simply put: short-sighting your comparisons is limiting your effectiveness to provide a detailed analysis for statistical comparisons.