Photo from our interview with Avinash at SES Hong Kong

The morning keynote speaker for the 2011 MIMA Summit was none other than Avinash Kaushik co-Founder of Market Motive Inc and the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google.  Avinash was a very funny and engaging speaker.  Nothing was off limits during his keynote.  Caught in the crosshairs of Avinash’s presentations were what he called “small” local companies (General Mills, 3M, etc) that dared to provide a “less than ideal” user experience.

Innovation was the topic of the morning’s keynote, ranging from which companies are a good (and bad) example of implementing innovation to proper metrics to show success.

What Are the 3 Definitions of Innovation?

Kaushik on innovation: “One of the great sexy things about the Internet is that everything you knew about the Internet 6 months ago is now irrelevant. “

• Incremental
• Incremental with Side Effects
• Transformational

How Can You Participate In Innovation?

Kaushik on measuring success: “If you only measure clicks, page views, visits, video views, touches, emails, and number of reports you are SUPER LAME.”

1. Accountability: Focus on the metrics that matter.  Do not let irrelevant data cloud your vision.  Increase loyalty by giving customers what they want.
2. Multiplicity: Losers only focus on the 2% of conversions they receive from their website.  Winners focus on the 98% that didn’t convert.  Social, Search, Content, Email are all things that drive value but should not be considered a stand-alone marketing strategy.
3. Influence: Traditional Marketing Strategy: shout to customers and hope that something will happen.  Internet Marketing: Create a flow of conversation between your brand and the end user.  Social Marketing Revolution: create not only a flow of communication between the brand and the consumer but encourage the consumer to share with their network.
4. 4. Fail Faster: Each one of us has an opinion.  Often the worst ideas are created by H.I.P.P.O’s (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). If you’re going to fail do it quickly.  Don’t let ego’s get in the way of making adjustments and tweaks to the original plan.

4 Ways Data Can Help You Do The Right Thing

• Conversion Rate = # of audience comments or replies per post
• Amplification Rate = # of re-tweets per tweet = # of shares per post = # of share clicks per post
• Applause Rate = # of favorite clicks per post = # of likes per post
• Economic Value = sum of short and long term revenue and cost savings

Create A Better User Experience

Kaushik on improving user experiences: “Be better each day than we were the day before.”

The Unreachable Coupon

How much time and effort would you spend to gain access to a .60 cent coupon?  Some corporations think that the answer is: 13 steps and 30 minutes spent filling out personal information (with no error checking) only to find that you have to install another program in order to actually print the coupon.  If companies only focus on the data they NEED they will avoid angering the very customers they were trying to engage.  Why does the Internet bring out the worst in us?

You Say You’re Innovative But You’re Not

The example used was that of a company whose homepage screams the word innovation…literally.  However, their design screams 1940’s.  What we learn from this?  If you’re going to use strong words to describe yourself make sure that your branding reflects your message.

Measuring Suckyness

If you want to form a long-term relationship with your audience you need to provide them something of value first.  Sites that bombard browsers with too many advertisements, links, and paths are “puking” so to speak on their users.   Filling your site with 400 links on one page is not a good strategy.  Avoid suckyness by providing value in a way that is easy for your audience to digest.

I Love This Website!

Websites that allow you get to where you want to be as quickly as possible provide a much better user experience.  By segmenting consumers as soon as they reach the home page they are much more likely to frequent your site because they know exactly how to navigate and will be provided information that only pertains to what they are looking for.

What Did We Learn?

• Extract Insights From Things You Do Every Single Day
• Force companies to provide us with the things we need to make educated buying decisions
• Be authentic!
• Stop guessing and start using the data available to you

For another blog post covering Avinash’s MIMA Summit keynote, visit Lisa Grimm’s blog: Communications Passionista.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | #MIMASummit: Avinash Kaushik Keynote on Improving Engagement Through Innovation | http://www.toprankblog.com

First up is Rob Garner, VP Strategy at iCrossing and a VP at SEMPO. Rob started things off with a description of the challenges that most often occur with measuring the search channel.

90% of search channel bugets go to paid media, but paid media supplies 20% of returns. Only 10% of budgets go to SEO but a huge percentage of search marketing performance can be attributed to SEO.

Why is this? Paid search is easier to measure. But… SEO can be made easier to measure in aggregate and at the keyword level once a balanced program is implemented. The biggest opportunities in search are with SEO.

Challenges on the client side regarding measuring SEO performance:

• Disconnect between legacy systems in tracking performance
• Using last click attribution
• Large companies measure value as “what have you done for me lately” natural search benefits tend to be longer term
• Not maintaining search performance history going back years
• Bad analytics and tracking
• Educating those holding the budgets for natural search

A longer term view of natural search is needed to understand the value. Natural traffic is earned but eventually owned. Look at maintenance costs of SEO as a realistic expense, especially in comparison to the contribution to revenue.

4 Key measurements needed for meaningful SEO metrics:

1. Value of searchequity for the site being optimized
2. Media value of natural search traffic
3. Value o various action across the site (individually and in aggregate)
4. Value of the stress and time costs on your organization. The cost savings of doing it now, vs. doing it later (retro-fit)

Building a Business Case – Key Questions

1. How much is invested in search
2. How much is a conversion worth? How much will it change with SEO?
3. How do we measure lift in natural search metrics
4. How much opportunity may be lost without a SEO plan?

Calculating Advertising Value Equivalent for SEO:

• Find out the anticipate traffic lost or gained in natural search
• Determine the average CPC in a themed area of one of your campaigns
• Multiply the average CPC times the amount of SEO traffic to quantify its media value. For example: 100k clicks times an average CPC of $2.63 is valued at $253k. In a year, that value is over $3 million.

Case Study:  A banking site re-launched with renamed URLs and no redirection plan. There was a spike in 404 errors and $1.5m in actual revenue per month lost.

Marketers must place a monetary value on actions to help SEO quantify results. Place a value on actions and also on lifetime value. When forecasting potential lift from SEO, be very conservative with traffic estimates.

Be sure to measure Year over Year trends, not just month to month to create context for growth and overall perfornance.

Next is Todd Friesen, Director of SEO for Performics who talked about incorporating SEM and SEO reporting to draw attention to the impact of SEO. “SEO hasn’t been getting it’s due”

Benefits of a combined SEO and PPC strategy:

• Visibility in both paid and natural decreases the frequency that consumers select a competitor
• Great opportunity to increase overall revenue
• Both can result in a significant lift in brand visibility

Managing both tactics holistically yields great results than using any one tactic. A big problem is that measuring in silos doesn’t give a complete picture.

Strategies for effective PPC and SEO:

• Max ROI by adjusting bid strategy based on SEO ranking data
• Keyword Gap Analysis – Identify strong performing keywords missing from your campaigns by comparing your SEO and PPC keyword lists
• Increased Efficiency – Share landing page and ad creative across disciplines. Ad text used as meta description tags.
• Creative Sharing – Share top performing ad creative with SEO for CTR optimization
• Clickshare / SERP Domination – Rolled up reporting identifying tru combined clickshare numbers

Testing framework for SEO and PPC vs. SEO alone: Identify top ranking organic keywords, select keywords for test and control groups, define hypothesis and success metrics, apply the test, evaluate the results and iterate.

SEO and SEM do not exist in silos. It’s only in the past few years that marketers are actually figuring out how they can work together – looking at data and approaching it holistically.

Last up is Catfish, Director of SEO at Business Online who focused on key metrics and reporting.

Key Metrics: How to tell if you’re winning or losing. Three phased approach. Performance, opportunity and prioritization

Performance Reporting:
Search Rankings – It used to be that when you ranked #1 on Google, you ranked #1 on Google but now rankings can vary according to localization and personalization. Search rankings can be useful for month over month comparisons, but otherwise are not the best indicator of success.

Tips on Effective SEO Performance Measurement:

• Segment keyword campaigns according to levels of specificity. Example: Campaign (Dog), Group (Dog Food), Keywords (Buy Dog Food).
• Distinguish brand versus non-brand performance
• Look at long tail performance.

Take your keywords and break them into groups, segment into brand vs. non-brand terms plus long tail keyword performance year over year.

SEO Intelligence is a service that leverages Adobe Insight to look at SEO data. It tracks at the visitor level and supports cross channel attribution (online and offline). Also supports predictive modeling. Ray is very enthusiastic about SEO Intelligence!

There were a few audience questions but I’ve used that time to finish off this post so I can publish it within a reasonable time.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Meaningful SEO Metrics – #SESSF | http://www.toprankblog.com

One way to facilitate learning about Social Media ROI, Measurement and Analytics is through books from subject matter experts. Here are 5 that I’ve found useful and hopefully, you will too.

Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization
by Olivier Blanchard

There are many other books on social media strategy, but in your pursuit of social ROI enlightenment, I’d start with this one (it’s also very new) because it covers social program development and management as well as measurement.  Olivier’s presentation on the Basics of Social Media ROI from a few years ago completely opened the eyes for many (including myself) on basic ways to approach the impact of social media on tangible business goals. It’s damn funny too.

Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment
by Jim Sterne

This may be one of the first books dedicated to socia media metrics and Analytics guru Jim Sterne does a great job of setting ground rules. This book isn’t about justifying social media at large or a collection of tactics. It takes you from goal setting to audience, influence, sentiment, action, conversation and business outcomes. Once you have all that, there’s advice on communicating your newfound social media measurement wisdom to the organization.

Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships
by Kattie Delahaye Paine

Katie Paine is the master of Public Relations and Social Media measurement and her new book is a great complement to our mix because it comes from a perspective of measuring and affecting influence, engagement and relationships – not just sales and revenue. Katie outlines how to get started with a measurement program, how to choose the right tools and she answers measurement “how” questions related to marketing and public relations, events, thought leadership, community, internal staff and crisis situations. This is a measurement bible for the social media and public relations savvy professionals of the world.
(Read our Public Relations Measurement interview with Katie)

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity
by Avinash Kaushkik

If you’re even remotely familiar with web analytics, then you know the blog Occam’s Razor by Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik. In his enthusiastic and entertaining style, Avinash explains the next generation framework of web analytics including social media measurement and includes specific guidance on hiring analytics resources, practical advice on the practice of  gaining insight from clickstream data and analysis, plus how to help managers become more data-driven in their decision making.
(Watch our video interview with Avinash at SES Hong Kong)

Mining the Social Web: Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites
By Matthew A. Russell

After you’ve read the books above and you’ve either tasked an internal analytics guru or hired someone for your social media measurement and analytics, then they really need to dig into this book. When business, marketing or PR managers ask question like, “How can we create our own tools to mine our prospects social web activity?” this is a great guidebook into the mechanics of making that happen. Matthew covers “data hacking” for Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, Google Buzz and LinkedIn plus how to visualize that data in a meaningful way.

While this is no comprehensive list of social media ROI, measurement and analytics books, it is a great collection to start with.  What books social media measurement books would you recommend?

(For the first time in 7 years, I’ve added Amazon affiliate links to these book URLs. Since we don’t sell ads here, I’m hoping you can appreciate  that effort).

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | 5 Social Media ROI & Measurement Books to Grow Your Social Business | http://www.toprankblog.com

At Search Marketing conferences, you’ll hear a lot about driving website traffic and links through social media linkbait – a SEO tactic that is distinctly different than what goes into building customer relationships. Companies like Proctor & Gamble are paying for engagement, not eyeballs.

Companies that want to take full advantage of better customer engagement, online word of mouth and influence on sales should ask themselves a few key measurement and related questions while developing a social media strategy:

1. What goals do you hope to achieve from a social media marketing effort? What does success REALLY look like short and long term? This is according to the segments or divisions of business affected, not just the organization as a whole. Customer service success is obviously very different than Marketing or Public Relations.
2. Are web and social media synced? How will current web analytics and other digital performance reporting interact with social media marketing analysis?
3. What measures of success (KPIs and Outcomes) will be used? How are you defining ROI?
4. Is there a strategic plan for coordinating and measuring social media efforts across the organization? Will these efforts work synergistically? In silos?
5. What are current measures? Is the business conducting a formal effort at monitoring social channels using a social media monitoring/analysis software application? (Ex: Alterian SM2, ScoutLabs, Sysomos, Vocus (TopRank Client), SocialRadar, Radian6) Are different business units using different monitoring tools? Are analysis staff allocated to making sense of the data and reporting?
6. Where to start? Is there a particular business unit, division or product that can serve as a test case?
7. What’s the current tactical mix? Assess current social media activities: How long has the company participated with social media sites and which? Blogging, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Wikis, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. Identify your benchmark measurements with relevant channels.
8. Is a dashboard and social media marketing management tool used for content promotion?
9. Moving forward, what will it take to transition from fragmented efforts to something more coordinated? Which “hearts and minds” do you need to win over for support to make it happen?
10. Is there an internal social media council or group tasked with assessing social media strategy and how will their role affect defining goals and ongoing performance reporting?

Every company, division, product/service and their customers are unique. The questions above can provide valuable insight into a company’s state of social media marketing readiness as well as provoking new thoughts and direction. The more informed companies are about planning for the social web, the more successful they will be.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 10 Questions for Social Media Measurement Success | http://www.toprankblog.com

Web Analytics is an excellent way to ensure your marketing efforts are not in vain. However, looking at Analytics without understanding user behavior may leave you treading water instead of creating a wake your competitors will fear.

One way to take your methods of measurement to the next level is to combine Analytics with User Experience (UX) information. What you stand to gain can be great whether you dip a toe or cannon ball into blended analytic waters.

To make sure you don’t sink, first understand that Analytics will tell you what’s happening on the site. User Experience Research then helps you understand why it’s happening by gaining insight into the behaviors and motivation of visitors.

When you combine both, you can start to understand the What and the Why of what’s happening on your website. This also allows any potential problems to float to the top more quickly, allowing you to see the problem you need to solve and what changes might do just that.

The following case study illustrates what you can find when you combine the power of Analytics and user behavior:

An insurance quoting website, which had a 14 page quote and purchase process was going through a website redesign and decided it was the perfect time to double check their form process.

The goal was to identify where in the funnel visitors were getting stuck and abandoning the process.

After understanding user experience and their reactions to what you are testing, the data should be compared to Analytics. Does Analytics show visitor ‘drop-off’ points in similar places as what was identified as confusing/irritating by the users?

To understand drop-off points and not spend time in lower-priority places, be sure to identify logical places for drop-off. In this example a make-sense drop off would be after the quote is delivered because you can expect that some visitors won’t like the quote they received and abandon to either get a different quote or purchase elsewhere.

Where you want to spend time is identifying the unexpected drop-offs. One such drop-off point for the health insurance quote form was the request for a social security number. Almost all users are cautious when giving such information online, but the problem in this particular case was that the information was asked for too early in the process before the person is invested.

As such, they identified an item to test. After placing the request for the social security number further into the funnel where the user was more invested and felt like it was OK to give their personal information, the abandonment rate decreased.

The next drop-off point was the question of where they attended college, which some – via the user experience testing – found offensive and/or didn’t understand how it was relevant to an insurance quote. The Analytics confirmed this and showed a higher than normal drop-off rate at the point that question was asked in the funnel.  Ask yourself, why is this question part of the form? Is it necessary? If not, remove it and improve the percent of visitors who get further in the funnel and closer to a sale.

Start getting more out of your website by diving deeper into the following 6 areas using both Analytics and User Experience Data:

1. Landing Page Optimization
Analytics: Bounce Rate, Conversion Rate
UX: Why people convert.

2. Site Navigation
Analytics: Top Content
UX: How they get there

3. Form Completion
Analytics: Abandonment, Page reloads
UX: Specific Objections

4. Content
5. Analytics: Time Spent on page
UX: Is it engaging?

5. Testing
Analytics: A/B Testing
UX: What to Test

6. Terminology
Analytics: Search Logs
UX: How people use language – what is your target marking using to search for you

In the case that you need to dip your toes, go old-school and simply sit behind someone and watch them navigate your website. Where do they go first, second, third, what do they avoid? Ask them why. Some data is better than no data.

Thank you to Fred Beecher and Andrew Janis of Evantage Consulting for presenting the above case study and tips on UX and Analytics during the 2010 MIMA Summit.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 6 Ways to Dive In to Analytics & User Experience | http://www.toprankblog.com

In this video interview, Avinash talks about the value of communicating analytics information in more meaningful ways. He gives examples of metaphors he’s used to present important analytics information that helps others better understand the meaning and implications of the data. There are lessons here for companies that report tabular data with no insight and little creativity in communicating insight.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What creative ways have you found to communicate web analytics insights? Have you had nightmare experiences with web analytics reports?

Check out Avinash’s “must-read” web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor, here.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Avinash Kaushik on Storytelling & Web Analytics | http://www.toprankblog.com

If my lead seems to negate the name validity of the SES San Francisco session, ‘Meaningful SEO Metrics,’  it is completely unintentional.

Moderated by John Marshall, CTO of Market Motive and SES Advisory Board Member, this excellent session featured on its panel:

• Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO, Enquisite
• Ray “Catfish” Comstock, Director of SEO, BusinessOnLine
• Jon Glick, VP of SEO and GM European Web Properties, Become.com

“Infinitely measureable means adjustable,” opens Zwicky.  “And online marketing is completely measureable.”

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Zwicky recommends companies and marketers look at is Share of Voice, or in other words, how much traffic are you receiving for a keyword or phrase when compared to the balance of the marketplace?

Online tools, from Google Trends to Tweetscan, can measure the amount of traffic or conversation generated by competing websites or in social platforms to give you an idea of just how much voice is out there. It’s not perfect, but it’s measureable.

Another KPI from Zwicky is attribution across channels.  For example, plot out the sales your company achieves on a local or nationwide map.  Next map out visits from social media, local media buys – or any other metric you would like to compare against.  You now have a quick and dirty map that can be used to compare your metrics and help measure the effectiveness of your tactics.

Zwicky’s map segues nicely into Comstock’s keyword metrics, specifically branded vs. non-branded traffic, long-tail keyword traffic and personalized vs. local rankings.

Branded keywords, traffic coming to your site via queries containing your brand name, are oftentimes more an effect of outreach programs while non-branded are an effect of SEO.  Long-tail keyword traffic, the iceberg below the water, measures all the variations of popular keyword phrases driving traffic to your site. Finally, personalized vs. localized rankings are everything that will appear above traditional search results – at times wreaking havoc for those used to a certain ranking position.

Combine the insight of Zwicky and Comstock – for instance – analyze branded traffic in  markets where media buys are heavier, and you have an indication of the effectiveness of your ad campaigns in driving traffic.  Analyze corresponding revenue and you have an indicator of the effectiveness of your ad campaigns towards sales.

Glick closes the session by continuing to urge audience members to see how data fits together, and to implement the types of tests that will show these connections.

‘Pseudo A/B testing,’ the process of adding new features to subsets of pages, can help illustrate the connections between minor and major website updates and corresponding changes to the bottom-line.  Pseudo A/B testing offers infinite possibilities for analyzing the types of changes that can be made to compel bottom-line results when implemented sitewide.

The path towards online success is driven by data of a different stripe daily.

What metrics, or connections, have you found beneficial to look at?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Is It The SEO Metrics Or The Connections Between? | http://www.toprankblog.com

What does exist in analytics is data – lots of it – and with this comes fear.

Fear of looking at the wrong data.  Fear of where to start.  Fear of analytics failure.

This fear will only dissipate with knowledge.  Knowing that analytics will never be perfect is a critical first step and a cornerstone shared during the session ‘Deep Dive Into Analytics’ at SES San Francisco.

Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board and NY Times bestselling author, moderated this session which included on its panel:

• Tami Dalley, Director, User Experience Optimization, ROI Labs
• Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear
• Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing

The beauty of an analytics session at SES is that those on the panel may sometimes be analysts or they may sometimes be statisticians, but they are always marketers.  And a good marketing analyst knows that it’s the facts that tell and the stories that sell.

As such, Bailey shaped his presentation around four key points that make up the bulk head of the website analytics story:

1. Intent
   Every visitor that lands on your website is there for a reason.  Bailey offers the example of a jewelry store pulling traffic for ‘watch’ based keywords.  Within this segment, some will be looking to ‘buy a rolex’ while some will be looking to ‘fix a watch + san francisco.’  Based on the keywords this segment used to find your site, did content match intent?
2. Expectancy
   Similar to intent, but expanded to include referring sites ranging from forums to blogs.  Did the source that referred the segment, say a forum about watch repair stores in San Francisco, shape user segment expectations accurately in regards to what they found on your site?
3. Reaction
   What ultimately happened when the segment of users arrived on your site?  Did they bounce immediately? Convert?  Did they do what you intended them to do?
4. Behavior
   Whether the user bounced, exited or converted, what behavioral clues did they drop along the way? Did they bounce after a mere ten seconds? Exit after visiting multiple pages?  Convert directly from where they landed or within just one step?

Remove these items from a numbered list, and add context, and this becomes an actionable story:

Users arriving at my site using San Francisco watch repair related keywords, or coming from local websites geared towards watch repair services, are bouncing at a rate of 85% and converting at a rate of 4%.  However, those that land on my Rolex repair services page from this same segment bounce at a rate of 60% and convert at a rate of 10%.  If I optimize my Rolex repair page for ‘rolex repair + san francisco’, I may capture more conversions.

Of course, the answer is never quite so simple.  Dalley and Weintraub illustrate this as they share detailed real world case studies and conversion reports, respectively.

Dalley’s case studies detail how the slightest change, from a page’s design to a customer’s location, can drastically shape results.  The key to making an actionable change is to start with an educated hypothesis before backing it up with the right data for proof points.

And this means overcoming a fear of data and digging in, as repeated by Bailey.

Since Weintraub is sorely misrepresented in this post, primarily because nearly any written word would be a severe injustice to the energy level he brings to his presentation, below find potential conversion reports or data ‘dig-in points.’  These are reports that you can pull from your analytics to make a decision from today.  The list below was both leveraged from and inspired by a list of deeply ‘unsexy’ (Weintraub’s words, not mine) possible conversion reports shared during this session:

1. Conversion by time of day
2. Conversions by rural Pennsylvania city
3. Conversions by mobile device
4. Conversions by web browser
5. Conversions by keywords containing the keyword ‘green dress’

Please add your own unsexy, or even sexy, conversion reports or analytics stories via a comment below.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Website Analytics vs. The Myth of 100% Accuracy | http://www.toprankblog.com

Analytics can provide a wealth of information but marketers often look at high level indicators such as: top content, bounce rates, entrance sources and keywords without tying it all together. In most cases, there is a tremendous amount of insight that can be used to make smarter marketing decisions, but most companies barley scratch the surface. At the OMS Minneapolis event last week  Adam Proehl gave an excellent presentation on analytics failures and successes. I’ve taken my notes from that presentation and combined them with my own opinions to create this list.

10 reasons why your web analytics are failing:

You speak numbers to non-number people.

It takes a numbers person to dig though large amounts of analytics data, figure things out, and draw conclusions. However, most people aren’t “numbers” people.

Many marketers like charts and clear, action orientated data. Charts are good, numbers in red and green help, and so does simplification. Don’t present tabular data just because it make sense to you. Try and think about who you’re presenting the information to and how they like to consume information. Some people like tables, others like graphs. As online marketers make an effort to understand the audience on the web they’re trying to reach, so should they understand the internal audiences that they report results to.

The statistics are fuzzy.

It’s easy to combine different pieces of data and come out with a great conclusion, even if they don’t go together.

For example, did you know that Michael Jordan and I have a combined total of 6 NBA championships?

While that statement is true, the conclusion is a bit skewed. Yes, Michale’s 6 plus my 0 do equal 6, the fact is that that I didn’t do any of the work for those championships, but I’m still getting the credit as I was included in the statement.

In analytics it’s important to break out the data so that it makes sense, not just so it looks good. It’s easy to combine two pieces of information in ways that make things look really good, but in reality, is something being hidden?

The averages are flawed.

Averages are great unless there is a major spike or dip. Then they have a tendency to skew the data a bit too much.

Based on the graph above, you could say that we’re averaging 1652 people from StumbleUpon a day. But in reality, most days there were less than 50. The big spike just screwed up the average.  As quickly as that spike came, it can also disappear and making decisions based on the daily average isn’t a best practice.

Sometimes things just don’t work.

There are lots of things that can go wrong with the analytics from a website and that has to be taken into account. The tracking code could be implemented incorrectly, maybe some special tagging was setup improperly, there could be issues with site architecture or maybe there are just things that are out of our control.

Analytics isn’t perfect and the reporting is never going to be 100% accurate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the numbers are wrong.

The important thing is to fix the issues you can and work with the numbers you have.

You don’t understand the customer.

Why are people visiting our site? What are they doing while they are here? What stage of the buying cycle are they in?

Thinking that you know your customers is one thing, but you really need to watch their behavior and see what they are actually doing.

Maybe visitors are focused on research or maybe they can’t find what they’re looking for when they get to your site. These are things analytics can tell you if you look and once you know what your customer is doing, you can modify your site to fulfill their needs.

You don’t connect the conversion dots.

Getting visitors to the site is one step. The next step is making sure you have content that is going to satisfy their need. As stated above, analytics can help with this, but once prospects fill out the contact form, what happens next?

How many decisions are made by looking at top level analytics alone? Someone has to tie leads back to the website to determine what is working and what isn’t.

For example, in a B2B situation, a whitepaper download may be bringing in lots of leads, but none are qualified. Maybe there is a CTA (call to action) form that is bringing in few leads, but they convert very well. Analytics can’t tell you what happens with a lead after filling out a form, and connecting that data is very important.

You don’t dig deep enough.

Looking at one metric in analytics and making a decision seems like a good idea unless you’re not seeing the whole picture.

A good example would be bounce rates to a landing page. Just because the bounce rates are high, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. You need to dig into the data and find out the conversion rate as well.  Changing a landing page because the bounce rate is higher than normal but that also has a higher than normal conversion rate may result in lost sales.

You don’t tie in outside data.

Marketers should be looking at other online and offline marketing efforts and tie them into web analytics wherever they can.  Ideally, an online marketing program should track different sources for different outcomes such as: people from Twitter to conversion, knowing which conversions came from email campaigns and what offsite marketing tactics are working.

You don’t take the time.

Analytics isn’t easy. It’s not something anyone can do in an hour a day (except maybe those that read this book of course). If website marketers really want to get valuable information out of analytics, they need to invest time and resources into talent that can make that happen.

Analytics can seem complex and yes, it takes time and talent to make sense of them, but in the end analytics can paint a picture of how users are interacting with a site, what the user behavior is, and point out ways to make your site more successful and profitable.

Bonus: 13 analytics tools to help you out.

• ShareThis – Social sharing button that can tie data into Goggle Analytics.
• Snip and Tag – Firefox extension that allows you to easily copy a URL and tag it with Google Analytics code.
• GA? – Firefox extension that quickly shows if Google Analytics is installed on the page or not.
• Better Google Analytics – Firefox extension that enhances Google Analytics.
• Enhanced Google Analytics – Another Firefox extension that enhances Google Analytics.
• Twitalyzer – Analytics for social relationships.
• Bit.ly – URL shortening with analytics.
• Google URL Builder – A way of tagging URLs with Google Analytics code so they can be tracked on external sites.
• Excellent Analytics – Microsoft Excel plugin to pull Google Analytics data directly into Excel.
• Site Scan GA – Scans a website to find out what pages have analytics installed and which ones don’t.
• Web Analytics Solution Profiler/Debugger (WASP) – Firefox plugin that debugs analytics.
• Crazy Egg – Heat mapping tools that allow you to visually understand user behavior.
• ClickTail – Heat mapping tools that also track where uses are when they bail on a form.

What are some of your favorite web analytics tools?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 10 Reasons Why Your Analytics Are Failing & 13 Tools To Help | http://www.toprankblog.com

[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.]

It’s an exciting time to be a small business owner or communications professional. Why? We’ve never had more data and metrics at our fingertips. Actually, we flew past merely having data to having real-time data.

Surprisingly some don’t initially like web metrics. Common concerns I’ve heard over the years include:

• It’s too confusing
• Information overload
• What am I supposed to do with all this data?
• Won’t all this tracking be expensive?

All understandable to someone new to digital marketing but ultimately unfounded. Web metrics are simple to interpret, can be parsed to provide just the information you need, and provide actionable insights for your products or marketing without requiring an expensive research firm. When introduced and walked through the process, most companies quickly fall in love with the accountability provided.

Getting web analytics setup is step one. Once you’re tracking, the next step is reporting in a way that is meaningful to stakeholders and using the data to provide actionable recommendations at the strategy table.

Beginning the reporting process:

1) Learn the basic and advanced functions of your analytics package

If you’re using Google Analytics and are new, learn both the basic and deeper functionality, such as creating advanced segmentation. It’s critical to understand your tool before you get into creating reports. Inevitably after making reports questions will arise asking for specifics, so you’ll want to know how to answer them. Smashing Magazine has a fleshed out guide to Google Analytics that will give you a crash course in the app.

2) Pull key data from your analytics package and document monthly in your own dashboard

While there’s little concern major web analytics services will lose data, you should (either automated or manually) pull metrics out monthly into a customized dashboard. Now here’s the critical part: just pull out the data relevant to your objectives and defined KPIs. You can always go back into your analytics package for more detailed metrics (and you should be doing that anyway). By pulling out the data relevant to your objectives, you are being your own best friend and making it simple to craft internal reports/memos, create presentations, share metrics with your team and have it in a malleable format.

3) Know the difference between KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and objectives

More traffic to a blog may be nice, but if your goal is to build subscribers traffic is just a KPI. More traffic will logically build more subscribers and it’s something you want to track, but it’s not your success metric. Most web pros are extremely conscious of this difference, however I’ve seen many businesses and marketers either confusing these or not bothering to define them in the first place.

4) Draft detailed insights and an executive summary

If you’re doing something like emailing a report with the monthly web analytics summary, don’t send just the data. It’s up to you to interpret what the data means to recipients. Remember, even though you’re taking the time to learn how to report on web metrics the digital divide is still very real. Many won’t even know basic web analytics definitions. If your company is still new to web reporting, it’s an opportunity for you to become the internal analytics evangelist and educate your team. The more they understand, the more valuable the web reports will become.

In addition to the detailed insights behind the data, create a brief executive summary each month outlining the major trends in a quick to skim format. If the summary is compelling – you may hook team members to read the whole report. With that said, many will never get past the summary no matter how interesting it is. So it’s a critical component to influence decision makers who don’t have time to read a 1,000 word report.

5) Create goals that push you, but are realistic

Great – you’re now not just tracking web analytics, you’re analyzing the data and creating insightful reports. A potential outcome is someone will say: “we want to increase X metric by Y %.” Goals are a good thing and will keep you focused, but make it a policy to keep them realistic. Growing organic web traffic is a long-term process which unless you’re a seasoned digital marketer you may not be able to project realistically (and even then there are too many variables for it to be predicted with 100% accuracy). If you’re new, stay on the conservative side so you don’t set unrealistic expectations.

Now that we’ve gone through some basic tips for web analytics reporting – let’s outline a skeleton of some SEO and social media specific metrics worth reporting on.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to SEO

A healthy stream of search traffic is vital to the success of any business’ visibility. You’ll want to monitor some specific KPIs to provide insight into your organic search traffic.

With the rise of personalized search, it’s smart to set your objective as organic search engine traffic, not search rankings. In a world where search phrases are getting longer and we all see a different SERP for the same phrases due to personalized search, rankings should just be a KPI.

• Branded to non-branded keyword mix - if all you’re getting is branded search traffic, you’ll want to conduct a technical and content SEO audit of your site as something is probably not in order. A well optimized site (unless it’s a brand with strong marketing prowess or has broad terms in their name) should see a majority of traffic from non-branded terms.
• Total organic traffic – increases in search traffic can potentially impact your other organic referral sources as well (for example, more people find the site via search engines, share via social channels, which spawns more referral traffic).
• Search engine rankings – they still matter to keep an eye on. An unbiased report of rankings in search engines for priority terms is something to monitor as it relates to the SEO health of your site.
• Most popular phrases – keeping track of the popular phrases sending you traffic is important – this data allows you to show correlation between rankings and web traffic.
• Unique pages on your site – if you’re interested in more search traffic, you should be adding content to your site over time. By adding fresh content at regular intervals, you’re creating signals to the engines to crawl more often and also create more potential search phrases users can find your site for.
• Depth/length of visit – if you’re optimized for certain terms but traffic from those terms is bouncing or leaving the site quickly, you may want to adjust your glossary.

More advanced users will want to track things like conversion rate per keyword, most popular pages, backlink volume and quantity, etc. But don’t become a victim of KPI creep – start simple and add more as you get comfortable.

Basic KPIs to monitor relating to social media

Along with your small business website, do you have a blog or forum where you’re nurturing a community? Below are some social-media specific metrics to monitor.

Your objectives could vary quite a bit (and may even be one of the KPIs listed below) as social media application is as open as your creativity.

• Number of subscribers – how many people are reading your blog through RSS or email every month? You’ll want to pay attention to this, as subscribers are a vital element of an online marketing growth strategy.
• Branded searches/non-branded – again, it’s important to know how many people are actively seeking out a community or blog you are monitoring/marketing. This number should grow over time as a byproduct of all marketing activity, digital or otherwise.
• Overall unique visitors - how much traffic does your community generate?
• Search engine traffic – search traffic to a blog or web forum should increase month over month as more content is added, links are acquired and authority is gained. If you execute properly increased search traffic is a by product of your social destination.
• Visitor to subscriber conversion ratios – how many people are coming to your blog but not bothering to subscribe? Might it be worthwhile to experiment moving around the subscription CTAs or adding another below content? You can’t know unless you’re tracking this data. Just compare unique visitors monthly to new subscribers and reduce. I.E. – if your blog had 1,000 visitors last month and 10 new subscribers, you’re converting roughly 1 subscriber per 100 visitors. It’s a rough number because certain referral sources will send better traffic but over time you’ll see the trend emerge.
• Followers/fans in outposts – Chris Brogan talked about using outposts in his social media strategy. Darren Rowse went ahead and fleshed out a visualization behind this. Outpost is the perfect word to describe how many of us leverage social sites to feed self-hosted communities that live in the open web. Track the growth of these monthly, and remember to do things that actively bridge the connections between them to strengthen your presence.
• Referral traffic – is StumbleUpon your #1 referral source month over month but you’re not calling it out specifically as a sharing button on your site? Are certain types of blogs sending you highly relevant traffic you can form deeper relationships with? A social program should be extremely sensitive to referral traffic.
• Number and quality of conversations/posts inspired externally - as your blog starts to grow in popularity it will spawn organic conversations/posts externally. You’ll want to know both how many have been inspired and if they were high quality (score them). Knowing this data, you can line it up next to your blog posts published each month and see trends in the the kind of content that resonates.
• Number of shares of content across platforms – in addition to conversations/posts inspired externally, you’ll want to know how many people Dugg, Stumbled, Tweeted or otherwise shared your content. Same process – line this up with content and you’ll start to see what is resonating vs. falling flat.

Wrapping up

Web analytics reporting is a requirement for modern businesses.  It allows your marketing to be more accountable and enables you to support key decisions with data – a powerful selling tool.  If you’re new, don’t let perceived complexity or jargon scare you off:  start simple and get into a rhythm with reporting on the basics.  Over time as your team becomes fluent the process, then you can add additional depth.

As many of you reading are extremely savvy in web analytics – what advice would you add to help those who are new?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Small Business Tips For Reporting Web Metrics | http://www.toprankblog.com

For many companies that are new to web analytics the idea of digging in and finding useful information can be daunting.  It’s common marketing sense to measure what you’re marketing, but making sense of analytics data doesn’t always find time in the mix of duties a small business or new web site owner is responsible for.

The amount of information that analytics packages deliver isn’t always easy to sort through and turn into business decisions. So what should those that are new to web analytics do? Keep it simple and start off with the basics.

Each analytics package is different in features, price and learning curve. I’d suggest starting out with Google Analytics as it’s free, feature rich, and not too complicated to learn. Start off by looking at the items below.

• Unique Visitors – Unique visitors are are an important metric as it counts everyone as one for any given time period. This means that if you had 250 unique visitors, 250 different people visited your site at least once. If your unique visitor number is low, it could mean that your site is either having issues in search engines, or need more content.
• Traffic Sources – Are you getting traffic from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, or other sites? Referring information can help you see where your traffic is coming from which you can then use to make decisions on where and how to promote your future content.
• Referring Keywords – These are the phrases that someone put into a search engine and arrived at your site with. Ideally they’d be keyword phrases that related to your company. If not, then it may be an indication that you’re either not optimized, or optimized for the wrong phrases.
• Top Content – No matter what size your site is, knowing what pages get the most traffic can help you when building out new pages. Using the same format, or building out content on that topic, can help drive more traffic. These are also pages that call to action (CTA) buttons should be added if you want your visitors to do download a white paper or do something specific.
• Location – If your business wants a strong local presence, the location area in analytics can tell you country, state and city of where your visitors are coming from. Are your visitors actually local? That’d be a good thing to know.
• Campaign Tracking –  Track visitors from sources where you are marketing to a particular goal page or conversion.

As you feel more comfortable with Google Analytics you can then start to explore other actionable data including conversions, trends and features such as the most often used search terms on your internal search engine. Features like goals, top entrance/exit pages, bounce rates, and time on site are also a good metrics to use in understanding how visitors are interacting with your content. Visit the Google Analytics Help page to find out everything you need to know to make the most out of GA.

Web analytics can be overwhelming as there is a lot of information to be analyzed and then decisions that need to be made from that data. Instead of trying to jump in and consume it all, take it one step at a time.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Basic Tips on Web Analytics | http://www.toprankblog.com

One of the biggest issues with SEO is duplicate content. If search engines can’t tell which version of a document is the original or canonical version, then there can be consequences involving less than ideal search visibility. For example, the following URLs might all point to the same web page, creating the illusion that they are copies of the same thing. But in reality, it’s just one web page.

www.domainname.com
domainname.com
www.domainname.com/index.html
www.domainname.com/index.html?referid=somesitethatyouareadvertisingon

Content management systems, e-commerce stores, and dynamic sites in general, used to be big on adding variables to URLs as a way to construct search queries on content or to track visitors. Then along came advice from the search engines that said they see each URL as a unique if it has different variables. That little improvement caused a duplicate content mess.

So over the past few years, web site owners and marketers have been hard at work cleaning up their URLs, removing variables and trying to make duplicate content a thing of the past.

Then Google came out with a canonical meta tag that could be used to help fix duplicate content issues. The advice was to simply add a canonical meta tag to any page and every version of that page will be considered one. No longer will there be duplicate versions and no longer will variables be a problem in creating the illusion of different copies of the same page.

The good news here is that Yahoo, Bing, and Ask also jumped on board to support the canonical meta tag.

What we didn’t realize was Google had a hidden agenda. (In my opinion) For a few months after the canonical meta tag came out, Google FeedBurner started populating every feed that runs though their service with additional variables in the URL. These variables are then used to better track FeedBurner clicks in Google Analytics.

So now, Google is pushing out URLs with multiple variables creating duplicate content issues for anyone who isn’t using the canonical meta tag. Additionally, if you use TwitterFeed to auto post content from FeedBurner to Twitter, or even copy the URL from a feed and share it, you’re also spreading the problem.

Google then came out with a URL builder tool that allowed you to track custom campaigns in Google Analytics by customizing your URLs with additional tracking variables. This extends the potential duplicate content issue even further.

So what doess this all mean for web site owners and marketers? It means that if you’re not paying attention, duplicate content could be causing you problems with increasing frequency. Do you know if your site has canonical meta tags? It should. Do you know if your FeedBurner feed is going out with additional tracking variables? It probably is.

A Solution: What needs to happen is the canonical meta tag should become a standard meta tag in web development. It should be added to all web pages as a safety measure. It doesn’t harm anything, unless implemented improperly, so ask your developers to code it into all pages.

As for variables in the URL, they’re still not good when it comes to SEO and avoiding duplicate content issues. Short and sweet is the best way to create URLs, but on that off chance that you need to track affiliates, want to track visits to a page from a specific online or offline campaign, or for whatever reason can’t avoid variables in the URL, then they are OK as long as you use the canonical meta tag.

Like it or not, the canonical meta tag is the only way to ensure that your site doesn’t fall victim to duplicate content issues. If you stop and think about it, it is an easy solution to a big problem. And once a site has canonical meta tags on their site, using the URL builder or variables in general to track URLs can be pretty handy. Webmasters just need to remember that a variable or two may be ok for some campaigns, but we don’t want to go back to long and ugly URLs because the longer the URL, the more difficult they’ll be for search engines, and users, to interact with.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Search Engines Bringing Back Variables In URLs – At Your Expense | http://www.toprankblog.com

When it comes to businesses leveraging the social web to communicate with customers and improve brand awareness, there’s some good news and there’s some bad news.

The good news: 86% of professionals have adopted social media in some way, according to a recent survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education.

The bad news: A whopping 84% of survey respondents who’ve adopted social media don’t measure their social media programs.

Even worse: 40% weren’t even sure they could monitor social media ROI.

Thankfully, there are a host of free or low cost tools available to help companies and organizations track social media success. Use one or more of these 5 social media monitoring tools to gauge how well your efforts are working.

1. Trackur

This social media monitoring tool from ORM expert Andy Beal tracks nearly every element of online media, from blogs, RSS feeds and Tweets, to images and video. Trackur provides the ability to not only view conversations about a brand, but also view the increasing or decreasing volume of the conversation. That way, users can be alerted to any spikes in buzz from a product launch or a negative event. Plus, Trackur offers analysis of any website mentioning a term being monitored, allowing users to distinguish how influential that site is. Monthly subscriptions to Trackur start at $18 per month.

2. PostRank Analytics

PostRank provides engagement scores to gauge how well pieces of content (i.e., a blog post, a news article) convinced users to take action (i.e., re-Tweet, a blog post comment, an RSS view). But beyond that, this social media monitoring tool shows the messages and comments from other sites that are contributing to the engagement score. In addition to individual pieces of content, this free service also maps out engagement activity and number of page views for entire blogs or websites per day.   PostRank also offers integration with Google Analytics.  Cost is $9 per month to track 5 sites. The image below illustrates a single post analysis with both engagement metrics and pageviews.

3. Google Alerts

This free tool from Google provides email updates of the latest relevant Google search results. It’s as simple as choosing a search term, determining the type of search results to be tracked (news, blogs, web, video, etc.), selecting update frequency and entering an email address. Google Alerts is one of the easiest ways to monitor brand mentions for both company and product names. Plus, the tool can be leveraged to monitor competitor mentions.

4. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, Social Mention – a real-time search engine – aggregates search results from blogs, microblogs, videos, bookmarks and other social sites. But this free monitoring tool goes a step beyond that. Social Mention provides a social ranking score based on popularity for every search (i.e., how often the search term is mentioned, if the sentiment is positive/neutral/negative). All of this data can even be compiled into a CVS or Excel spreadsheet.

5. TechrigySM2

SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. The “freemium” version of this full featured social media monitoring service allows you to create up to 5 profiles and each query is limited to storing up to 1,000 search results. There are many features with setup and reports as you can see in the screen shot below. Along with standard help and FAQ resources, there’s a Ning powered Techrigy social network or Community of users that you can tap into and share information.

Incidentally, we did an interview with Connie Bensen, Director of Social Media and Community Strategy at Alterian, the company that owns TechrigySM2 earlier this month.

Whether you leverage one of these low cost or free tools to get started or other tools like Collective Intellect, Cymphony, Converseon, ScoutLabs or Radian6, it’s critical to track social media efforts and tie results back to the goals of your business. Because the scary truth is this: When cut-backs rear their ugly heads, the first programs to go are those that can’t illustrate measurable results and link them back to organizational goals. Don’t find yourself in that 84% of Mzinga and Babson Executive Education survey respondents who don’t measure the effect of social media.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | 5 Near Free Social Media Monitoring Tools | http://www.toprankblog.com

How can we track social media?
Unfortunately, there is no one “most effective” social media tracking system. Marketers across the web are still working to figure out how to measure social media, how to attach ROI, and how to sell the benefits of participation on the social web  to those that don’t “get it”.

Social media marketing isn’t like an email campaign where you can track the number of emails sent out, the number that were opened, the number of clicks, visits, leads and conversions all in one process. Much of what happens in the social media world happens behind a login and the old ways of tracking web visitor analytics just doesn’t work in that scenario.

Just like any kind of marketing, each company has their own set of objectives and reasons for reaching them via social media channels. That means different methods and approaches to the listening, monitoring and measuring of both social web and web marketing activities at large. The field of social media analytics is still very new.  Here are 7 considerations as you evaluate what will work best in your social media tracking.

Quality over Quantity
This has been said again and again and lots of people still feel that the more followers/friends/subscribers/connections they have, the better. The reality is, quantity is not and end goal for lead or sales generation outcomes. What good is it to have 13,000 followers if 1/3 of them are spam accounts and 1/3 are auto followers who will never engage with you? Sure 13,000 looks good to those who can only focus on numbers, but what is the quality of those 13,000?  Seth Godin mentioned at the MIMA Summit that all you need is an audience of about 1,000. But it needs to be the right 1,000 people.

Hearing vs. Listening
Have you stopped to think about who is actually paying attention in social networks? A person or a brand may have X number of followers or friends, but how many of them are actively listening at any given time? How many people do you ACTUALLY reach when you post a tweet, make a status update or blog post?  Subscriber counts and reach are two different things. Think of it like a college professor talking to students: How many of them are paying attention during a lecture? With social media participation it’s the same thing; you need to realize that not everyone is always hearing what you have to say and factor in the difference between connections and actual reach.

Engage & Participate
Effective social media marketing is about is engaging and participating. If  a marketer joins a social network and focuses on promoting themselves, product or company, they’ll get an entirely different set of outcomes than those they have goals for.  Think about it. Social means to be conversational, friendly, helpful. When participating in social channels, talk to other members of the community, participate in the conversations and give people a reason to interact with you. Add a little romance before you ask to get engaged

Social Media is About Being Where the Conversation Is.
Marketers need to stop and think about where their audiences are online and where relevant conversations are happening. That could be niche social networks, forums and blogs. Those niche areas may have fewer people, but will more than likely have more engagement value for relevant products or services being shared.  To find those niche communities and conversations, use social media monitoring software. Free tools include Google Alerts or Social Mention. Low cost tools include Trackur and PostRank Analytics.

Assign Value to Get Value.
Whether it’s a tweet, retweet, a status update, comment, photo upload or story submission, if you want to find out how valuable it is you have to assign a value. It doesn’t matter how or what that value is, but setting up some sort of system will help determine what’s working and what’s not.

Define an Objective.
Before jumping into social networking, it’s essential to set an objective. Going in and participating with social network and media sharing sites just to participate may not bring the kind of results you’d like. A clear objective as part of a social media strategy should be set so you know what you are working towards. It will guide your messaging, behaviors, networking activity as well as the kind of content you seek and share.

Social Media is An Investment.
Social media success takes time. The seeds of relationships need to grow and you’ll need to invest what’s needed to make it work for whatever end goals that are set. Expecting results in a month or two isn’t realistic; it may take a year or more. It really depends on the Roadmap that guides your: Audience > Objectives > Strategy > Tactics > Tools > Measurement.  Effective social media participation is about building a network and building trust. That doesn’t happen overnight. Be patient, do it right, and you’ll be rewarded in the long run.

What other considerations should be in this list? If you’ve undertaken new social media programs with your company, what were some of the measurement and analytics hurdles that you overcame?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | 7 Considerations for Tracking Social Media Success | http://www.toprankblog.com

The MIMA Summit breakout session “Storytelling: Actionable Insight from Analytics” was jam packed with collective analytics wisdom shared by panelists Jason Rapps, Joel Wright, Marshall Sponder, and moderator Jennifer Veesenmeyer to help organizations overcome 3 key web analytics obstacles:

1. Getting traction – getting from stage 1 to stage 2
2. Nurturing a data-driven culture – pushing analytics to the rest of the organization
3. Extending analytics to Web 2.0 and other new technologies

To answer the burning question of how to overcome the obstacles listed above, each panelists elaborated on a specific obstacle.

Obstacle #1: Getting Traction
Jason Rapps, Senior Web Analyst at Motorola, explained to the audience that the real question when working with analytics is “What do I do with this data?” Further, Jason advised that the first step in gaining traction is actually to take a step back and determine what success means for you/your company.

To succeed with analytics, actionable metrics must be delivered and confidence in the data must be instilled throughout the organization.

Recommendations to get traction and succeed include:

• Being consistent in the information you provide, and target to the audience
• Knowing the weaknesses of your system and communicate to team/management
• Communicating your needs
• Not overpromising – be realistic and prove the value
• Understanding the difference between “Metrics” (numbers) and “Analytics” (the story that explains what is happening, why it is happening and helps identify what to do next)

Obstacle #2: Nurturing a Data-Driven Culture
Joel Wright, Senior Web Analytics Consultant, Dell outlined success factors as well as the obstacles encountered when working within a data-driven culture.

Success with Analytics:

Obstacles/Challenges to Overcome:

Recommendations to Nurture a Data-Driven Culture include:

1. Focus on goals/Impact ($) – understand what you are going to do/accomplish and tie to the bottom line and create a model that everyone can understand.
2. Review Scorecards Weekly – critical to nurturing a data-driven culture and creates a common vocabulary between team members. (Make sure to include commentary on why the numbers are fluctuating.)
3. Invest in Analytics Talent – challenges can be overcome by a person the “gets it”, turn the data into information that can work for you.
4. Bonuses for Achieving Goals – tie an incremental bonus to meeting the goals set forth.
5. Training and informal workshops – need a way to engage and needs to be consistent.
6. Include Analysts from the start – information /advice/requirements can be communicated from the beginning versus after a new creative, flash, etc. is launched.
7. Constantly test – everybody is testing, now the question is what to test.
8. Market Successes – use the numbers to communicate the successes. (Share with the team that the numbers are being used to achieve goals.)

Obstacle #3: Extending Analytics to Web 2.0 and Other New Technologies
Marshall Sponder, Founder of Webmetricsguru.com, explained that social media, search & web analytics are converging, and ultimately changing the future of analytics.

Examples of recent mergers/acquisitions/partnerships that will change the future of analytics include:

• Adobe recently acquired Omniture (merging creativity with measurement)
• What people want to see is an analytics paired with design/creative so they can be measured rather the ongoing “silo” effect.
• WebTrends partners with Radian6 (Omniture & Coremetircs soon to follow) and SalesForce.com (Social CRM).
• Tealium tracks brand exposure and pipes data to Google Analytics, Omniture and Coremetrics.
• Comscore and Omniture partner to provide categorization and AD Tracking.
• Nielson and Facebook partner to do online research.

So what does this mean to Web Analysts?

Marshal wrapped up his segment of the presentation with the following thoughts:

• The future the social media data will be merged with analytics
• Data collection is a commodity right now, intelligence is not

In closing, Jennifer Meister, VP of Analytics at Stratigent and moderator of the Storytelling: Actionable Insight from Analytics session, summarized the recurring themes reiterated throughout the session as:

• So much data – so much to do, focus on the information/analytics that adds value
• Tie goals – awareness, advocacy and then get numbers around them
• Silos are coming down –  teams are becoming integrated

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | Storytelling: Actionable Insight from Analytics | http://www.toprankblog.com

SES San Jose 2009 is off to a rockin’ start and this afternoon I’m sitting in a session about turning web analytics into money.

Avinash Kaushik, from Google, shared this #1 rule with the audience:
Don’t Stink! If you do, nothing else matters.

To get started, figure out which pages Google has determined are your home pages (i.e. the pages they send traffic to) and fix those pages first. The biggest opportunity lies with these pages and reducing bounce rates.

How to Rock It!
1. Focus on user behavior
How many people purchase 0 days after visit, 1 day after and so on.

Try softening the call to actions on the landing pages, knowing that very few want to buy right now. Rather, most are researching and then will go back to the most helpful website to make a purchase. It’s not all about price!

2. Optimize Match Types
Make sure your metrics match to net profit, not revenue. Revenue can be increasing while profit is decreasing.

3. Convert Opinions into Hypothesis
Don’t let opinions prohibit your company from making a profit. Take the opinions and start testing them as hypothesis to get outside your perceptions and into data.

4. Competitive Intelligence
Find it and use it.

Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now promises to help the audience learn the secret to making analytics work for them.
It starts with prioritization and all comes down to budget. How much can a company afford to invest either in testing, creative or resources.

1. To do web analytics correctly, make a to-do list regularly

• what marketing efforts or parts of the site have challenges
• what  needs to be improved
• what things need to be tested
• what efforts should be reduced
• what efforts should be increased

Then, prioritize based on the answers above, specifically which will impact objectives. The biggest failure of many companies is generating a report and doing nothing with it.

2. Segment your way out of sadness
Average metrics produce average results

Marketing efforts are meant to target different segments of a target audience and measurement should fall in line accordingly.

Understand the different types of people visiting your site and then create personas based on those different segments: competitive, spontaneous, humanistic, methodical.

Persuasion of those same people is a process, not an event.

3. Always Be Testing
A/B and multivariate testing, available with Google Website Optimizer is a great place to start.

If you can,  conduct user testing to identify usability concerns and get to the voice of the customer.

Next, the GodFather of analytics Jim Sterne steps to the podium.
Tip #1 – Do what Avinash said
Tip #2 – Do what Bryan said
Tip #3 – Do it again

Beyond the 3 steps above, make sure to optimize the shopping basket. Look at Amazon for an example with 1 click purchasing (sweeeet!).
Don’t make it hard for a visitor to buy from your website.

When optimizing the basket, determine the value of a visitor. Don’t forget that a conversion might be from a sequential search process. i.e. a visitor searching for camera, then digital camera, then 8 megapixel camera, then a search for a Nikon coolpix. Yes, the Nikon coolpix converts higher – great! But don’t discount the value  ‘camera’ and ‘digital camera’ played as ‘assist keywords’. They led the visitor down the road to purchase.

Q&A from the audience:
Question: When someone is coming to the site, you mentioned softening the call to action from a buy-now to a send me more information. Have you seen the conversion rate drop?

Answer from Jim: What we have trained people to do is put an item in the shopping cart, input their email, abandon and then wait 24 hours to receive a 10% discount if they come back and make a purchase they intended to make anyway.

Answer from Avinash: I’m patient. If I have to wait a couple days or couple weeks to result in higher conversions that’s fine with me. If you are only worried about selling for today (sales people!!) then you are going to lose out on the visitors who are seeking to be educated prior to purchase.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | SES SJ: Turn Web Analytics into a Money Making Machine | http://www.toprankblog.com

Let’s find out with John Marshall of Market Motive.

Marshall starts out by illustrating Van Halen’s very unique pre-show requests.

Specifically, Van Halen was very clear that in their dressing room, there should be M & M’s, but no brown M & M’s.

The business lesson of the brown M & M’s is ‘lose early’. They used the brown M & M’s as an indicator of whether or not the contract had been read. If not, then they knew everything needed to double checked including  many steps in the contract meant to protect the band and the equipment used during the show.

As a marketer, you will end up in situations where you cannot move the decision makers. So, if you are going to lose – lose early.

In some cases, analytics will be used to do nothing in an effort to preserve jobs. Figure out early who is willing to be swayed and who is not and don’t spend time on those who won’t sway.

Richard Zwicky, Enquisite, outlines what the C-suite wants. Even for those that understand the information, there is too much detail and more than what they need to perform their jobs.

So what does the C-suite want to know?

• Investment
• Revenue
• ROI

They want to understand the correlation between the investment and what the business received.

Specifically, they want to be able to forecast and compare intelligently across channels via at-a-glance reports. The details aren’t what they want, they want an assessment.

On the other hand, the search marketer wants details like referrals, page views, unique visitors, time on site, etc.  These are all essential to a search marketer, but irrelevant to the C-suite according to Zwicky. So what the search marketer should REALLY want is the ability to improve the web site’s customer acquisition numbers for the terms which drive the most value.

This will allow you to bridge the gap between the search marketer and the C-suite.
In order to create a web analytics culture, realize that it’s:

• not about the data
• about the right information
• about facilitating smart business decisions

Next up is Ron Belanger, from Omniture, commenting that you know times have changed when giveaways go from cars to M & M’s.

Back to metrics, Belanger takes us through the 7 Keys to Creating a Data-Driven company.
1. Secure an Executive Sponsor
Anyone who would benefit significantly from web analytics. They can help you set priorities and protect the web budget from others.

2. Align implementation with business objectives
Study shows only 18% have measurement strategy

3. Invest in staffing and training

4. Establish and maintain corporate standards
Might take you longer to implement, but data you extract will have higher value within higher ranks

5. Celebrate quick wins
Data and reports are not success. Create actionable insights from the reports.

6. Test and Measure Data Validity
Acid test the data with your team while setting up measurement processes and tools, not after. And be sure the data is sound and accurate.

7. Hold people accountable

Matt Bailey, Site Logic, is next.

Analytics is subversive, therefore your job is to constantly ask why. You should constantly attack accepted norms and keep questioning if what you are doing is going to reach objectives.

Unfortunately, in school and businesses asking questions is frowned upon. Questioning authority, as an analyst, becomes your job. Find the things that are accepted as ‘true’ and disprove them. Not to be a PIA, but to better serve the organization or the client.

Make sure that your analytics decisions don’t come down to who is loudest. It’s not benefiting anyone involved.

A way to help make this happen is to test. When you test things, you remove the emotion and let the numbers speak. Whoever wins can then gloat in whatever way they want.

Attach numbers to dollar signs (and big numbers) when presenting to ‘The MAN’. By questioning ‘The MAN’, you become not only business-driven but an analytics diva. Disclaimer from Bailey, “If you do any of what I just recommended, I am not responsible for your job.”

Feras Alhlou, E-Nor encourages the audience to know the organization. Next, know your audience within the organization. Don’t start off complex numbers or even visuals.

Look at measurement in 7 phases, including:
1. Auto-pilot
No measurement, periodic reports, some works/some doesn’t but don’t know which is which

2. Web Metrics
Measurement baby steps. Start a dash board and get the audience familiar with the data.

3. Conversion
Micro(download) and macro(customer) level conversion.

4. Cost Data Integration
Campaign Performance and ROI. Look for 80/20 rule. This phase requires more stakeholders and resources.

5. Offline Data Integration
Phone + Web Inquiries gets you to a more accurate number

6. Lead Quality/Classification
Go beyond the number and start to understand the quality.

7. Business: Cost/Revenue per Customer
Tie the metrics to cost and revenue per customer. Go beyond the numbers and understand which campaigns/channels are truly driving revenue.

Leave any other thoughts on how to create an analytics culture, below in the comments.

Learn more search engine marketing and social media strategies from 2009 SES SJ coverage by TopRank Online Marketing

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | SES SJ: Creating a Web Analytics Culture | http://www.toprankblog.com

Measuring the effect of SEO for Public Relations benefits should start with well defined outcomes. To get a good handle on SEO effectiveness, it’s important to match the purpose for the effort with specific metrics.  For example, if improving brand visibility is a goal, then documenting brand mentions in connection with news & PR content at regular intervals can demonstrate the effect of content promotion and link building. 

Online PR metrics and tools often include:

• News wire service metrics (see screen capture below)
• Web analytics for landing pages and web site
• Google and Yahoo alerts
• Monitor blog search engines (via RSS)
• Press release landing page conversion tracking
• Social media monitoring
• Inbound links
• Pickups on blogs
• Pickups on other web sites & online publications
• News and Standard Search Engine Rankings
• Conversions: Less likely sales, more likely white paper downloads, webinar signups, newsletter subscriptions, demos, etc

As I’ve mentioned, the specific metrics and tools to use should match the news content being optimized and it’s purpose. For example, a press release that is keyword optimized and announcing a promotional offer of some kind, should have tracking codes added to the links embedded in the release. Those links should point to landing pages designed to convert visitors from the press release to the desired outcome. Ranking is not a worthwhile metric in this case but conversions are.

Capturing various measures and key performance indicators isn’t enough to gain support for optimizing news content in many organizations.  These efforts belong within the Public Relations effort and should emphasize goals consistent with PR objectives. Sometimes it takes a little creative packaging of analytics to help other departments or upstream executives “get” the value of  optimizing PR content for search.

Here are a few tactics to use in order to sell the value of SEO within a PR effort:

• Show competitor social search visibility vs client/company
• Show competitor’s optimized news content ranking in various types of search engines where the company/client is not (and probably should be)
• Research a keyword glossary and run a ranking report on those phrases. Show the lack of search visibility for what search audiences are actually looking for, relevant to the business
• Run a test of a few news items, whether they be blog posts, press releases or a digital asset like video. Take a benchmark measurement first and then show progress.
• Set keyword ranking goals for news content and estimate the cost to achieve the same goals with PPC advertising over time. Demonstrate the cost of organic search traffic vs PPC traffic.  

If you can’t get budget approval for an overall search campaign as part of specific PR efforts, then using a competitive example or a small scale test might be enough to demonstrate the value of incorporating SEO with Public Relations.

That wraps up our series of posts on Top Ten SEO Tips for News and PR where you can find an index of all 10 posts as well as the PowerPoint deck that inspired it.

Please share your opinions on the series. Not just the content and whether it’s useful, but the the format of posting a themed series. Did you like the series? Was 10 posts too many?  Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | Measuring the Value of Search Optimized PR | http://www.toprankblog.com

Measurement is inherently core to many forms of digital marketing but has been a bit more challenging in the PR and social media space. Katie is a measurement pioneer who has demystified and provided much needed innovation to the world of measuring public relations and the social web.

 This interview with Katie covers quality vs quantity measurement, building a business case for measurement investment in a down economy and she also answers a few questions posed by @leeodden followers on Twitter.

You are the Queen, Diva and Goddess of PR measurement. How did you get there? 

Practice, practice, practice J and of course all the little people, the mini-gods, princes, and knights that make what I do possible J Seriously, I was an asian studies major, trying to work in corp. com in silicon valley and had no credibility, so I started looking around for data. I knew how to use excel and make pretty charts and graphs, and I found that it worked. After that its just been a question of staying on top of the market and the way I do that is to steal a phrase – I follow the money. Wherever marketers are spending money, measurement will follow. 

At SXSW we talked briefly about online media measurement that focuses on quantity metrics – comments, links, participation, etc and you also talked about adding a quality dimension. Can you elaborate on that?

We use both the standard quality dimensions like tonality, positioning on issues, dominance and prominence, as well as the engagement index (number of posts on a topic divided by the number of comments) when we factor in the engagement, it tells us what people are REALLY paying attention to rather than just what people are talking to themselves about J 

Please share a few tips for companies looking to make some kind of investment in proper digital media measurement. Why, what, how and/or process? Also, what free tools are there to get started?

The best free tool out there is Google Alerts and Google Analytics and Twinfluence and Xinureturns – all of which give you data.  Then there’s www.compete.com if you want to get a general idea of reach, and of course Radian6, Techrigy, and a bunch of others in the $500 a month category – all these tools give you quantified data – in other words how much is being said about you. THEN if you want to actually have a human analyze it, you can do it yourself with our www.diydashboard.com or you can have www.kdpaine.com expert readers and analysts do it for you for around $3-6 per post depending on the subject matter. We can also code within the Radian6 and Buzzlogic systems if you’re already committed to one of those.  The most useful new tool is www.tealium.com that tells you where the visitors came from BEFORE The last click. 

Building a business case for PR and influence based digital marketing can be a challenge in a down economy. What practical advice do you have on how analytics and measurement play in that effort?

Be very clear about your goals. Goals drive the type of measurements you are going to use. So once you get everyone clear about the goals, then you can develop a meaningful measurement system. Are you trying to spend less money, then you need to measure cost savings, not “HITS”  if you want to change your image in the marketplace you can’t measure that with hits either, you need to look at positioning and messaging. Remember that you become what you measure, so you need to make sure your metrics line up with what you were hired to do. 

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see companies making when it comes to digital PR and marketing?

Confusing size with results. People are addicted to big numbers, thanks to the folks in advertising,  but just because you reach 10000000000 eyeballs, doesn’ t mean you‘ve gotten any one to engage in your brand, recommend your brand or act in a way that you want them to act. 

How do you stay current with industry news, trends and tactics?  

I read what my Twitterbuds tell me to read and I have Google Alerts for everything that interests me, blog measurement, marketing measurement, pr measurement,..  I have google alerts and I follow and friend my clients on Facebook and Twitter so I know what’s going on wth them. and for my clients. Twitter and Twitter search have replaced my RSS feeds. What resources can you share (blogs, books, newsletters, conferences) or specific people? I have a long list of people I follow on Twitter and read pretty much whatever they write or whatever they tell me to read. That includes you,  @chumley @thornley @davefleet @shelisrael @shel @kamichat @acarvin @queenofspain @onthemedia . etc etc. I pretty much check Twitter Search every morning so see what people are talking about in my marketplace 

Which social tools to you use most often for your own community building and marketing? 

Twitter, blogging, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, in that order  

Gardening or cooking?  

Gardening, because it burns calories so I can eat what I cook J 

And now a few questions from Twitter:

@danperry What are three tangible social media measurement methods I can use today, show my boss tomorrow, and use in decision-making?

Depends what your goals are, for your own blog: set some clear goals using Google Analystics, and measure monthly till you achieve them. 

Set up a google alert for you AND your competition, track your share of the conversation, share of the POSITIVE/Faborable/desirable conversations, what is your share of the undesireable conversations? 

@taulpaul Any examples on how SMM (social media measurement) helped forecast sales for a client?

At this point no. There just isn’t sufficient data to do any kind of accurate forecasts. One would argue you can’t accurately forecast sales from traditional media any more .. so forecasting via SMM is an even larger stretch. 

@doreenhowell What are the best tools for freelancers to use to measure?

Depends what you’re trying to accomplish? Can’t answer that question without knowing your goal.  Also what are the most telling measurements improvement in relationships, engagement, change in positioning and perceptions, donations and costs savings. vs. those expected by clients that may not be meaningful? If a client is expecting “HITS” or “Ad Value Equivalency”  resign him/her immediately and run in the opposite directions because those metrics aren’t meaningful and are frequently misleading. 

@mikebilleter Traditional PR is often measured in “media impressions.” Do internet users’ shorter attention spans change the value of an “impression?”

There are no accurate “impression” or more accurately “Opportunities to See” numbers for social media. Unless every blogger chooses to publicize his/her readership or google analytics you really haven’t a clue as to how many impressions youre making. You can really only count impressions on the very large mainstream blogs.  Even if you have 10,000 followers on Twitter, you have no idea how many people saw your tweet because of the continuous updates and the volume of tweets. The only thing you can accurately count is what readers do as a result of seeing the information,.. again thru Google Alert. Using unique URLs you can get a very accurate picture of what stories are driving traffic  

@AlisonIlg What are the newest social media measurement tools? 

Techrigy is the newest one I’ve seen.. like Radian6 they are essentially 21st century clipping services. I’m fond of Twinfluence and Twitter Analyzer as well. What do clients really want now with the PR programs? They really want to know what impact PR is having on the mission – -whether that is saving money, saving lives, or selling stuff. 

@KellyeCrane PR consultants sometimes have limited access to big clients’ Web analytics. What metrics do you recommend in that case?  

Tell them that you can’t measure your results or continuously improve the quality of your program without that data and therefore you can’t do your job. Companies that silo information like that deserve to fail.  Make a stand, don’t measure dumb stuff, measure what matters and build your credibility. 

@amyburke02  Can we track social media hits on Twitter and Facebook the same as any other hit in print or on radio/TV? i.e. do they have the same value (Lee)

No, of course not because there’s no way of knowing who is viewing a Tweet or  a Facebook page or a blog.  Radio and TV are measured based on panels. Compete runs a similar panel that will tell you approximately how many people go to a particular site. But they don’t include Facebook and Twitter accounts. To measure Twitter you need Twinfluence.  And I’m not saying  that they don’t have value, they may have MORE value depending on how meaningful they are to your clients. But unless you know what your clients value and pay attention to, you don’t know the value of a particular social media channel. 

Thanks Katie

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | PR Measurement Interview with Katie Delahaye Paine | http://www.toprankblog.com

Woopra is a desktop client but also offers web based visibility to reporting. The interface is not only visually appealing but offers an entirely different format for viewing interactions with blog content and in particular, information about visitors.  

Woopra also offers a live traffic page with a “Start a conversation” feature:

Another blog centric analytics tool is NuConomy Studio - an analytics plug-in for WordPress offering insights into blog analytics through “stories” as well as activity statistics you’d expect from a web analytics package. It also lists user activity by name when registered:

Clicky is probably one of the most popular blog analytics services besides Google and offers many standard measurement tools in real time as well as a spy feature.  RSS subscriber and Twitter follower counts can be added to the main dashboard.

Radian6 is not exactly a blog analytics tool in the sense of web analytics, but it offers tracking of what happens off the blog via social media monitoring, analysis and workflow – all in a visually engaging format.  Having a hybrid web analytics tool combined with something like Radian6 would be a serious Killer App for the social web.

Crazy Egg is a unique and useful tool for testing usability on web sites or blogs and ties on page activity with referrers. I include it in this list because of the Live reporting and visualization options that drill down to individual users. It’s most useful for determining where users click on “call to action” elements within your blog. Are they clicking on the RSS button or the text “Subscribe” more often. You can test quickly and easily.

What blog analytics packages with rich visualization features have I left out? Would love to see suggestions in the comments.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. | Visualizing Blog Analytics | http://www.toprankblog.com