SES New York: Web Analytics & Measuring Success
Web Analytics & Measuring Success
Laura Thieme, Bizresearch
Stacy Williams, Prominent Placement
Packed house in a big room.
Laura Thieme
Web analytics — all about proving value.
Is search delivering:
– leads?
– sales? at a loss? at a profit?
Can you track organic vs. paid?
Make sure tracking strings are setup correctly:
– provide more information than traffic, than visibility
– measure ROAS to understand added value
How Can You Track?
1) Visibility: WebPositionGold, using APIs (version 3.5)
— I only track on 1st and 15th of month
— ranking reports particularly important when doing a redesign
2) Tracking Spider Activity
— how long will it take to get spidered/indexed/ranked?
3) Keyword Referrals
4) Path analysis — good
5) Funnel reports — better
— learn which pages lead users to contact forms, other important conversion pages
Web Analytics Time Crunch
— be willing to invest in analytics as a standalone service
— be able to discuss details with clients (who may not have time/desire to see details)
— no tracking tool will do everything
— might need to use more than one tool
Stacy Williams
Why measure?
— for strategy and planning; analytics can support and prove what’s working and what’s not
What to measure?
— KPIs (key performance indicators) are different for B2B vs B2C, for publisher vs retailer, etc.
— KPIs can change over time
Ask yourself:
— what do we want to know? have clear understanding of the goals
— what will we do with the data?
Where to start?
— okay to start small
— set a time to look at reports
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Case study: Atlanta Children’s Center
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Minimize the “spaz factor”
— Prominent Placement has high bounce rate
— analytics showed why: site ranks for unrelated terms like “atlanta marketing firm” and “atlanta placement” (i.e., job placement)
— you can’t control all the terms you’ll rank for and all the sources of traffic you’ll have
Client reports: numbers are great, but what do they mean? Provide insight!
[tags]sesny2007, seo[/tags]
