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Social Search can be used to drive traffic, conversions, and increase ROI by monitoring conversations happening online. This panel is a first for SES with Marshall Sponder, Senior Web Analyst for Monster.com as the Moderator.

Industry leaders Todd Parsons, Co-founder and CPO of Buzz Logic, Rob Key, CEO of Converseon, Edmund Won, Vice President of Strategy for iCrossing along with Breanna Wigle, CRM manager for Military Advantage share insight into monitoring the conversation and best practices to track success.

Marshall kicked off the session making the case for Google to start measuring and reporting user trends in social media.

Categorizing referring traffic from social media is the first step in attributing success. Is your traffic coming from blogs, social network sites, message forums, bookmarking sites, micro media sites and photo sharing sites?

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.

Google Analytics is a great program that can do a lot more than most people realize. Here are a few features that you may not know about:

• Capture internal search stats. This is a newer feature of Google Analytics and a very nice one. Not only can you see what a visitor put into your internal search box, but what page they were on when they made the search and what page they chose in the search results. Any internal search will work as long as it passes the search variable through the URL. Here’s a short video interview with Google’s Brett Crosby on some of those features.

There are a lot of data points that can be meaningful for tracking blog effectiveness. That is, tracking what happens when visitors arrive at and engage with your blog content. It really comes down to the purpose of your blog. Metrics for a blog that’s focused on making a web site more search engine friendly by adding crawlable content and attracting links is quite different than a blog that’s meant to build thought leadership or brand credibility.

Many of the metrics tools used for blogs are also used for basic web site analytics. That makes sense because many blog initiatives do not have the same kind of budget as web site marketing programs do. Therefore, the analytics employed tend to be low(er) or no cost.

UK based e-consultancy holds periodic round tables meetings with agency and client side search marketers to discuss issues in the industry with a report published afterwards. The most recent September report, which highlights a number of search engine industry developments, SEO challenges and tactics motivated me to write this post. Many of the issues in the report are on the minds of in-house and agency marketers world wide.

Here are a few of the issues discussed and my own thoughts as they relate to each with a nice little rant at the end:

I was recently taking a survey from Jupiter or ClickZ (I don’t recall which) and one of the questions asked about measurement of success for search marketing. While a lot of what you hear from search marketers involves talk about fundamentals ranging from links to rankings to visitors and conversions, the answers offered in this survey included a pretty interesting mix:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Building buzz
• Search share of voice
• Improving brand favorability
• Increasing intent to purchase
• Maintaining brand exposure alongside competitors
• Engagement with rich media (i.e. video, animation)
• Engagement with photo galleries, social features, interactive calendars, local or destination information
• Maximizing value of sponsorships, celebrity endorsements
• Online purchase
• Lifetime revenue per user
• Profit per user

Chris Sherman is doing another Search Marketing Now Webcast tomorrow at 1PM EST on “Measuring Search Success“. This is a free event sponsored by our friends at ClickTracks.

You’ll learn:

• How to recognize a successful search strategy
• How to fine tune your current marketing efforts
• Which analytics tools can save you time and money

Chris is without question, one of the most knowledgeable people in the search marketing industry, so sitting in on this webinar is a no-brainer.