Online Marketing Blog

[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?

Just about every business with a web site does something to market and promote it. When those companies are asked about web analytics, it’s surprising how many look back with a blank stare.  This isn’t the case with mature online marketers but it does happen a lot with new business web sites and blogs.

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.

With more and more marketers jumping onto the social media bandwagon, a lot of questions come up. Is it possible to track metrics and ROI? What are other companies doing? Why isn’t it working? Being prepared to answer  questions like these can make a difference in how a company interacts with social media and if they can succeed.

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”.

There’s a certain sentiment amongst many marketers that, “If you can’t measure it, it’s not worth doing.” While that perspective may not be entirely applicable to all online marketing, it certainly draws attention to the need for insight from measuring what we do to market, communicate, promote and influence on the web.  The need to better understand the value and application of web analytics data as well as social media measurement is critical for companies that want to compete online.

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

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!

What does Van Halen have to do with Search Marketing?

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.

What is it about web analytics that that intrigues and yet scares companies at the same time? Everyone want to understand analytics, yet once one starts digging in, it can get complicated. In Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers, they gave tips on what you should be looking at and what you should be paying attention to.

Here are a few of the tips & thoughts that were shared:

Craig Danuloff

• Invisibility; what can’t we see?
• Every search is a question, every ad is an answer. Keywords simply connectors.
• ROAS is a ‘feel good’ metric. don’t take it seriously.
• Deception – Can you trust what you see?
• Accuracy – What’s the margin of error. Is there statistical significance?

Google is the Wizard of search marketing’s Oz. The all-powerful being around which our universe orbits, and the all-knowing guru to whom we turn for website advice. While Google, like the wizard, may guard its own secrets, it lifts the curtain and lets us look at the inner workings of websites. In this session, two of Google’s own, Avinash Kaushik and Tom Leung, gave us an insider’s tour of changes in Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, two tools of incredible value to search marketers and webmasters alike.

Google Analytics

Avinash, author of Analytics Evangelist, outlined a few key uses of Google Analytics that can make a huge impact on the success of your website.

Bounce Rate

So, you’ve launched a search marketing campaign. You spent time and energy putting it all together and now it is live. So how do you track results of the campaign? The panel this morning at SES San Jose shares their knowledge on measurement and tracking in the communicative world of Web 2.0.

Avinash Kaushik kicked us off this morning by talking about how challenging it can be to track results (traffic, links, visibility) from the content placed online. He gave an example of the BBC creating their own content, then distributing that content on their own web channel where users consume that content on the BBC website. However, when Web 2.0 came out and the sense of community and opinion was created, a random Joe Internet can come onto the BBC site and make comments, sharing his thoughts on the BBC website through forums or comments on news stories. Joe also has a blog where he can share his content with the world. And there are news mashups that pull in information from news sites and blogs and it is difficult to find out where the news originated from.

Social media monitoring and social media measurement are two very different things, but I think many of the searchers and social media taggers using those phrases don’t always make the distinction. For some quick insight from a qualified audience, I turned to Twitter and within an hour had about 40 replies.

It started off with this Tweet: Twitpoll: What’s a better term: “social media monitoring” or “social media measurement”?

Many of the responses were a specific selection of “measurement” or “monitoring” but most pointed out that social media measurement and monitoring are different things. Monitoring is what you do to find information which you can then measure.

It was a pretty neat application of using Twitter for a quick poll with near immediate responses from professionals that might not respond to traditional polling methods. Below are the actual replies:

The conversions track at SES New York continues to be packed with those wanting to increase the performance of their search marketing campaigns.

The “Converting Visitors into Buyers” panel was moderated by Aaron Shear from Boost Search Marketing and the speakers included: Mike Moran from IBM, Nigel Ravenhill from McAfee, Michael Sack from Idearc Media Corp. and Howard Kaplanfrom Future Now Inc.

I missed the first half of this session but was able to sit in on the second half and hear Mike Sack and Howard Kaplan give the audience ideas on increasing conversions.

Michael Sack started 0ff with a story about why milk is always in the back of the supermarket.

A full house was in attendance for this SES NY session in which panelists discussed how to squeeze the most out of analytics and turn data into action.

Specifically, Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist from Google shared the following.

3 Tips to Getting More out of Analytics

1. Measure bounce rate

As Avinash described this is essentially when someone comes to your website, vomits and leaves. OR in a less disgusting but not as funny way this is a visitor who having not found what they were looking for left the site immediately.

Be sure to measure bounce rates to understand the number of individuals who are abandoning the website. While some of the traffic will be irrelevant and therefore always likely to bounce, the majority are bouncing because the information they want (while it may be on your website) is not at their fingertips.