The Secret To A Web Analytics Career: Stop Learning Web Analytics!

This post originally appeared on Corry Prohen’s blog.

Eventually, your web analytics career is going to hit a wall.  Learning interactive marketing as a web analyst, you start with the numbers and then seek context.  When you stop to think about it, it’s really an inside out view, isn’t it?

You can master tags, logs and the many intricacies of implementation and that will get you so far.  If you want to go from good to great, then you’re going to have to stop learning analytics.

Advance Your Career with Action

Measurement craves action.  That’s why site testing (a/b and multivariate) has been such a huge hit.  Your success as a web analyst is defined by the impact of the changes your work inspires: more leads, higher revenue, greater customer satisfaction.

Start your search for by following the money.  In most companies, the budget is often biggest in one of these 4 channels:

1. Paid Search

2. Email Marketing

3. Organic Search / SEO

4. Landing Pages

1. Paid Search

eMarketer predicts that paid search spend will hit $10 Billion by 2010.  Each year, more money migrates from offline advertising to online buys, often starting with paid search (aka pay-per-click or PPC advertising).

Who’s to blame them?  PPC advertising, most often on AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, is among the most measurable marketing investments you can make.  That’s exactly why web analysts need to get up to speed… fast.

The basic structure of paid search advertising is simple: you select words, bid on them, write a text ad and send them to a landing page.  The reality is far more complex.  To get started, I recommend you start with a simple 5 point PPC questionnaire:

1. How are we performing against our yearly and monthly goals?

2. Which campaigns are driving 50% of our cost?  Which ones are driving 50% of our revenue (or similar KPI, such as leads)?

3. What are our ad groups and how are they performing?

4. What is our impression share for the top campaigns?

5. How is competition affecting our brand campaigns?

This is a mix of simple questions, but you’d be amazed how eye opening they can be for a web analyst.  I threw in “impression share”, because it’s a metric that few outside of paid search understand.  It once again highlights the need to move outside of just one tool.

You can get a good overview of paid search with this guide.  For free advice on measuring and optimizing paid search, check out the ClickEquations blog.

2. Email Marketing

Email is a rather unsexy channel.  Most people think of it as outdated at best or spam at worst.  The truth is that email is very much a part of online marketing in a basic way (support email, order confirmation) and more advanced uses (personalized offers, abandoned cart recovery).

As an analyst, you can lead the charge to maximize email ROI by asking:

• How does email stack up against other channels?

• What’s the most effective way to grow our subscriber list?

• What have we learned from past tests?  How can we structure future tests to boost results?

• Which segments of our list are most valuable?

• What kind of from and subject lines boost open rates?

I usually turn to the Email Experience Council to find resources for email marketing.  Their Email Stat Center is a really great collection of research and some stats for comparison.  The Email Benchmark Guide is a good starting point.  For more in-depth training, there is an Email Marketing Summit coming up shortly.

3. Organic Search / SEO

Of all the channels on this list, organic search is most likely to frustrate analysts.  Unlike paid search and email marketing, you can’t know or measure many of the aspects that contribute to successful search engine optimization.

Search engines are fundamentally secretive about what drives rankings to a.) keep their competitive advantage and b.) reduce the amount of gaming of the system.  To top it all off, it can take months (or more) before your changes produce results.

Even with those barriers, the value of measuring and analyzing organic search as a web analyst is huge.  A well optimized site can drive significant traffic with no per-click cost, which means more money for your company and more kudos for you.

Start with some basic questions:

• How has our organic search traffic trended year over year?

• Which pages are bringing in the most organic traffic?  Which search queries (aka keywords) drive them there?

• How does organic search drive our bottom line–profit, new customers, etc.?

Next, dig into some more advanced questions:

• What is your keyword share for our targeted search queries?

• How should we balance our organic and paid search efforts for maximum ROI?

• How do our blogging and social media efforts help SEO traffic?

I keep up with the SEO space by reading Search Marketing Gurus, SEOMoz and SEOBook.  Copywriting has a big impact on organic search efforts, which is why I read Copyblogger.  Their SEO Copywriting series is a good intro.  For something more in-depth, try this guide.

4. Landing Pages (aka entry pages)

Every marketing campaign has to point to a page on your site.  What should that page look like to yield maximum profit?  Welcome to the world of landing pages.

The immediate post-click experience has a tremendous impact on the profitability (or viability) of your tactics.  Paid search is getting more competitive and expensive, while display is as pricey as ever.  If you want to wring out the maximum results, then regular testing of your landing pages has to be a standard practice.

The good new is that there’s tremendous upside in testing for any analyst out there.  It’s all about data driven decision making instead of opinions and guesses.  Not sure which headline is best?  Test it!

The simplest way to get started is just to launch your own test using the free Google Website Optimizer.  If you’re familiar with page tagging, the setup should be pretty straightforward.  The real trick is understanding test design and measurement.

I recommend you start with Jonathan Mendez’s Expert Guide to Multivariate Testing.  Bryan Eisenberg’s blog often features useful testing tips.  I read Marketing Sherpa’s newsletters for new ideas and they have a handbook.

Conclusion

The fastest way to advance yourself, or your own business, is to focus on action and the bottom line business goals.  The more you can partner with marketing and improve results, the more invaluable you’ll become.  Take some time to expand your horizons beyond web analytics and you’ll be a better analyst for it.

Posted by guestblogger on February 3, 2009 www.ppchero.com

This week we are featuring guest articles from our PPC Hero allies! We requested submissions from our readers and we received excellent responses from some great PPC bloggers! The PPC Hero team will return to our regularly scheduled articles next week. Enjoy!

I love log files, analytics, and looking in your own backyard for PPC keyword strategies. I think your own site’s keyword data is the best and purest (though not the only) place to start your keyword research. Your site’s keyword data offers you three things: relevance, accuracy, and relevant accuracy.

Relevance - You know these keywords are relevant to your business and your site’s content, because people have already gotten to your site via these keywords.

Accuracy – I find that actual traffic data is a much better indicator of actual traffic than playing around with the daily/weekly/monthly estimates from keyword tools.

Relevant Accuracy – If I go to a keyword research tool and see that a lot of people are searching for a keyword, that’s obviously useful data. But what would be more useful is to know if the people who searched for that keyword would then become a conversion on my site. I can learn this by looking at my own analytics.

And, I don’t think there’s any debate that keyword data is becoming a proprietary commodity for businesses who advertise online. As such, I think it makes a lot of sense to invest in building out a keyword list complete with actual data about how many times people will actually visit your site if you bid X, and about how many times people will convert (and at what price!) if you advertise against a given keyword.

Acquiring This Data Without Breaking Your PPC Budget

A great way to build this keyword database would be through organic search engine optimization. While I balk at the idea that SEO is “free” (try hiring good copywriters, creating the kinds of relationships that build trust, and employing someone competent to ensure that your information architecture and keyword targeting are optimal for “free”), you can at least pay a minimal price for irrelevant clicks in SEO, and you should be targeting various keywords and tracking their value, anyway.

But what if you don’t have much SEO data? You or your client has a new or poorly optimized site? Here are a couple of tricks for doing PPC keyword discovery “on the cheap”:

• Embedded Match – This is a “matching option” offered by Google (really it’s a mash up of two matching options, but either way…). Basically, it allows you to advertise against variations of a keyword without bidding on the keyword itself.
• Multiple Match Types – I think it’s a good idea to employ various matching options for testing purposes. You can also apply this principle to frugal keyword discovery.

Let’s take a closer look at how this would work for each option…

Embedding More Keywords Into Your PPC Campaign

I like broad match for keyword discovery, but it certainly presents some efficiency issues if you’re trying to provide ROI and hit a target CPA. SO what’s the solution?

Bid low on your keyword discovery engines, bid high on the keywords you know perform well.

Let’s say I run an online retailer focused on the sale of banjos (hey, someone has to be selling banjos online, right?).

Anyway, I know that the term “banjo” is too broad. It has a very high CPC, and aggressively bidding on it with broad match will lose me a bundle. In fact, clicks on “banjo” are simply an overall loser for me. But I still want to find all those great banjo terms I don’t yet have on my keyword list (more importantly, I want to know which ones convert).

I can just take the term banjo, and set it to “embedded match”:

-[banjo]
banjo

This means that I am advertising against banjo on broad match, but if someone types in “banjo” exactly, my ad won’t show:

banjo – WON’T show
banjos – MAY show
cheap banjos – MAY show
banjos are making a comeback – MAY show (also the statement is just very true)

Key point: now I will turn the bid way down on this keyword.

This lets me accomplish two things:

• Find New Keywords – I can discover long tail keywords that people are actually searching for, that I wouldn’t have otherwise stumbled upon.
• Find Out How Effective Keywords Are – While a keyword tool might show me “cheap banjos”, it can’t tell me whether it will convert for me. This system can.

Option Two: Being Broad But Focused

For the second example, let’s assume we have a bit of account data already. We know that “cheap used banjo” is a great performer for our used banjo store (I know I was selling all kinds of banjos at the beginning of the article, but the banjo vertical is pretty cut-throat, so I had to focus on something a bit more niche).

Now, I have some conflicting interests:

• I want to bid aggressively on cheap used banjo. It’s a great performer and a key part of my campaign.
• I also want to discover new, effective keywords surrounding this one.
• I don’t want to pay for garbage; I have run the keyword on broad match, and bidding on all those extra terms killed my CPA from this keyword.

The solution is to bid aggressively on the more restrictive matching types (phrase and exact) and to bid considerably lower on broad match:

cheap used banjos ** 0.50
“cheap used banjos” ** 4.00
[cheap used banjos] ** 6.00

The way it’s been explained to me by my AdWords rep, is that if I run these three options, broad matches will be assigned to the broad keyword, exact matches to the exact keyword, and phrase matches to that matching option:

online banjo store – BROAD
where to find great cheap used banjos – PHRASE
cheap used banjos – EXACT

Thus, I get to bid aggressively and ensure that I am extracting the maximum number of impressions from my “cheap used banjos” keyword, while finding new phrase and even broad matched variations and getting a feel for how they perform.

If the “online banjo store” keyword turns out to be a great performer, I can give it it’s own “broad but focused” test run and see if I can’t discover a whole new vertical of keywords…on the cheap!

The Value of Great Keyword Lists

The moral of the post is really that keyword lists are valuable assets. If you would pay a monthly subscription for a keyword tool, why not invest some of your PPC budget in finding new keyword verticals? Why not pay to get data about how specific keywords and bids work for you or your client specifically?

Paying a little now for a proprietary, site-specific keyword list can offer you big returns in the long run.

Guest Blogger Bio: Tom Demers is the Senior Marketing Manager at WordStream Inc., a pay-per click software manufacturer specializing in PPC management and keyword solutions. You can contact Tom at tdemers AT WordStream DOT com.

Feb 3, 2009 at 5:41pm ET by Matt McGee

www.searengineland.com

Buzz has been growing over the past 4-5 days about what appears to be a new Google search results test that, if widely implemented, might spell doom for SEO rank checking software and some other tools. Many are concerned that it could kill web analytics software, too, but that may not be the case.

Google appears to be testing AJAX-based search results on a limited basis. Users who are able to access the test see different URLs for Google searches. Rather than the standard www.google.com/search?q=keyword, URLs in the AJAX test use a hash mark, like this: www.google.com/#q=keyword.

Michael VanDeMar wrote about this test last week, and a commenter on that post points out that the test was active in The Netherlands as far back as November.

What Does It Mean?

If Google rolls out AJAX-based search results on a wide scale, there could be some big ramifications. As Michael VanDeMar and the commenters on his post point out, SEO rank checkers and other tools could be rendered useless. (Google would probably like to kill such rank checking software, as it has long viewed these tools as taking computing resources it would rather use for human visitors).

While some might not cry for those still stuck in the rank checking mentality of the past, a post today from analytics software provider Clicky says it would also have dramatic impact on web analytics tools, those that measure activity from visitors who come to your web site:

“This change breaks search/keyword tracking for every single analytics app in existence…. the fact that Google is even considering doing this, with blatant disregard for the fact that they will be breaking every single analytics, stats, and log analyzer product on the planet, is just amazing.”

Both the Clicky post and this one from Aaron Wall suggest Google may be setting up Google Analytics as the only software that will be able to track keyword referrals from AJAX-based search results. Says Aaron:

“…what happens to existing tools? Plugins? Rank checkers? Stats and other referral tracking packages? All tools that rely on Google passing data in order to work…. Perhaps the only place you’ll be able to get this data is Google Analytics? Is this the next step – a lock-in? It has happened before.”

But analytics tools might be able to account for a hash mark in URLs; it’s just that most of them don’t handle it right now. Nathan Buggia recently wrote about URL fragments (the portion of a URL after a hash mark) on Jane and Robot. In that post, Avinash Kaushik — Google’s Analytics Evangelist — provides a javascript snippet that will allow tracking of URL fragments after the hash mark. If a short piece of Javascript is all it takes to track what comes after the hash mark, most analytics software providers should be able to update their software to accommodate a chance to AJAX-based search results. (see postscripts below)

We’ve contacted Google for an official confirmation of the AJAX-based test and a comment on its potential impacts, and will update this post if/when we hear back.

Postscript #1: Sean from Clicky, who authored the post we linked to above, has added some clarification for us.

“Yes, Javascript can be used to track the #hashmarks at the end of the URL. This isn’t the problem though. Javascript has a variable called “document.referrer” that contains the URL of the referrer for the page you are currently looking at. Web browsers don’t store the hash in this variable, so there is no way for us to get it.”

To clarify further, the javascript workaround mentioned in the Jane and Robot post only works to track URLs with hash marks on your own site; it doesn’t work to track hash marks from a referring page.

Postscript #2: A Google spokesperson shares this statement:

“We’re continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search, please see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html.”

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Matt McGee is the Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and offers search marketing consulting and training to businesses of all sizes. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and HyperlocalBlogger.com.

Why SEO Needs Your Web Content

October 24, 2008 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization, Web Design

A client recently approached me to discuss redesigning their website, optimizing it to rank well in Google, and contracting me for some basic marketing and promotion.  Now, this has happened to me a few times, so I don’t want to single out any one client (and I wouldn’t mention them by name even if you asked me).  But their thought process was, well, we’ve got about 100 or so pages indexed right now, but we want to get rid of them and pare that down to just a half dozen or so really sales-driven content pages.

My question, of course, was Why?  Why would you ever want to throw away valuable content (let’s assume for now that it was valuable content about their product and/or service offerings)?  The answer is always the same – we want to drive customers directly to the sale, so let’s push them there with a short, concise marketing message.  What’s wrong with that?

The failure, or disconnect, or whatever you want to call it, is always in the misunderstanding of the purpose and viability of the business website as a sales medium.

Marketing on the web is not like marketing in person, or on a phone call, or via any other medium.  If you were making outside sales calls I would say yes, you’ve got the right idea.  Make your pitch fast and focused and close the sale before they hang up.  So let me make this analogy – do you think customers will call you to listen to your outside sales call spiel?  No?  Then why in the world do you think they would take time out of their day to find your website to read it?

This particular business website, like so many others, suffers from a particular shortcoming I like to refer to as the “sales brochure” website.  They want just 5 pages on the site – one that talks about them, one that says where they’re located, maybe even has a spiffy little mapquest map, one page with their product listings, a contact form, etc. – you get the idea.  And again I make the comparison – what do you do when someone you don’t know hands you a sales brochure full of pitch?  That’s right – you put it in a scrapbook and save it for posterity to peruse later.  No, you don’t?  Really?  Then I guess you’re not surprised that your visitors aren’t going to bookmark your site and come back later to reminisce about your amazing sales pitch.

There’s a very easy solution, both from a marketing perspective and from an SEO standpoint.  Add actual valuable content to your website!  Not pitchy crap, but actually useful information.  You may find that your potential human customers will really think that it’s worthwhile, thereby giving your site the reputation as an authority in your market.  You may find that they return to the site to read more or begin emailing their friends about your great resource.  But more importantly for the promotion of your site, you will definitely find that Google and Yahoo love it.  And nothing assists in the promotion and marketing of a site like ranking in organic search results.

With more web content updated on a regular basis comes increasingly more attention from the search engine crawlers.  Pretty soon your site will be indexed faster (usually within minutes of publishing new content) and will begin ranking for all kinds of organic search terms you didn’t even know would attract customers (that’s what we call the long tail keyword effect).

Then you won’t even need to hire a NJ SEO like me!  Not really.  Content is just the first step, but it is the most important.  If you find an SEO that tells you otherwise, turn and walk away.

Why SEO Needs Your Web Content – Barry Wise NJ SEO and Marketing Consultant