Ryan talked about the importance of goals. He suggested measuring what makes sense, not just things that are measurable. He defined the following as viable SEO goals:

• Sales
• Leads
• KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
• LFAs (Lower Funnel Activities)

The following are not valid SEO goals:

• Keyword Rankings
• Visits
• Video Views
• Facebook Likes
• Twitter Followers

Reporting vs. Analytics

These two are different. Reporting shows what the number is. Analytics tells why and what to do about it. Goals should be actionable. If what you’re doing doesn’t offer actions or insights, it’s reporting, not analytics.

Ryan also mentioned to familiarize yourself with Google’s Webmaster Tools, because pretty soon it will be the only natural search data we have.

Chris stressed the importance of your client’s goals, and how your SEO goals should align with them. You client most likely doesn’t care about indexation metrics, number of backlinks, and they might not even care about traffic. Your job is to know what they care about.

Chris also discussed a number of “trap” metrics: he advised caution when migrating from one analytics program to another. He also advised against using traffic as a success metric. He also warned against the rankings trap fail, and advised that in this day and age “there is no one single objective ranking.”

The post SES 2012: Meaningful SEO Performance Metrics appeared first on 435 Digital.

The Web Analytics Dive Deep session on Thursday afternoon was presented by Thom Craver (@ThomCraver). This session focused primarily on how to use Google analytics to tell stories about visitors on your website, especially from the perspective of someone who does a lot of email campaigns.

There are ways in Google Analytics to track clicks from various campaigns, primarily email campaigns. Use Google URL Builder to create custom URLs for each link that you put in your campaign. Thom used a good example from an email from the Obama campaign, where each of the three calls to action in the email had a different custom URL so that they could be tracked. That way the Obama campaign would know which of their calls to action were working better for which people, not just if that email in general was converting people.

When it comes to telling customer stories and teasing information out of data, ask yourself some of these questions:

• Which segment (20%) of visitors is providing the most (80%) conversions?
• The most revenue?
• The most profit?

These three areas aren’t necessarily the same, and by asking yourself these questions, you might be able to increase your profit a lot while only having to raise conversions by a little.

All in all, it was a fairly interesting session, especially for companies who do a lot of email marketing. Even for those who don’t, it was good to get some tips on how to start segmenting website visitors in order to better understand them.

The post SES Chicago: Web Analytics Dive Deep appeared first on 435 Digital.

The panel started off with an announcement of a mobile marketing report released by ClickZ and the Google Analytics team detailing the future of mobile marketing and measurement.

The panel discussed how, even though the use of mobile devices has become extremely popular in the last few years, only recently has the marketing value of mobile begun to be realized. As a result, they expect mobile marketing budgets to increase. Mr. Singer stressed the value of utilizing mobile analytics to win support for larger mobile budgets.

The panel stressed the importance of considering how people use mobile devices. Just because a device is mobile does not necessarily mean that the user is “mobile”. Mr. Allen stated that “There isn’t a ‘mobile’ user any more. Users just move from device to device to device.” Mr. Singer talked made the point that mobile conversions are different from web conversions. A mobile conversion might be a click-to-call, opt-in for an email newsletter, or just take the form of general engagement. He also stated that nearly 1 our of 5 of all marketers market a non-mobile experience to mobile users, meaning that mobile users might be directed to a landing page designed for a desktop computer, which results in an unsatisfying user experience.

A popular question from the audience was whether to have an app or a mobile version of a website. The panel agreed that each can be valuable, although each has worth in it’s own right, and that the needs of the user should guide the decision-making process. Mr. Hafiz stated that studies have shown that a lot of users on tablet devices use the tablet’s browser to make purchases (as opposed to apps), and suggested that a balance be found between apps and mobile websites. Mr. Singer mentioned that app engagement is important, and stated that, once a user has downloaded your app, “if they’ve used it (only) once you’ve failed; you should not have an app.”

The post SES Chicago: Metrics for Success in the Mobile and Apps Ecosystem appeared first on 435 Digital.

bit.ly: Basic analytics

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On October 18th, Google announced that over the next few weeks they’ll be introducing encrypted search (via SSL) for those users who perform a search query while signed in to Google.

As a result, this will limit the data seen in analytics programs. We will no longer be able to see the specific keyword search that brought that user to a site. In Google Analytics, that traffic will appear as (not provided). In Omniture/SiteCatalyst, from what I understand, you won’t even see (not provided); your Referrer Types report will show an increase in traffic from Other Web Sites and your Search Keywords and Search Engines reports will show an increase in traffic from None.

Google claims this change will only affect a single-digit percentage of search volume. I looked at 10 Websites I have access to analytics data for, and since October 18th the mean affected traffic has been .05% of total traffic, and 1.1% of Natural Search traffic. So, at least thus far, from what I’ve seen, Google’s claim checks out.

There is a bit of a double standard in place, as Google Ads aren’t subjected to the same level of encryption.

Overall, there’s been an uproar in the SEO community; see Danny Sullivan’s post, or Rhea Drysdale’s post, or Ian Lurie’s post.

Why have they done this?

I don’t believe that Google’s master plan is to eliminate this data completely. Why would they risk alienating (nay, threatening the careers of) the entire SEO community, a passionate group of people that RELY on search engines for their livelihood? If not suicide, that would at least be PR self-loathing. Google expects the SEO community to be outspoken, and is most likely using this as a barometer to measure the climate, in preparation for their next move.

Should SEO folks be freaking out? Yeah. We gotta speak up and let Google know how seriously this ties the hands of SEO.

What might happen?

Ok, so let’s assume Google is legitimately serious about user privacy, and requires a Website to run over SSL before passing any referrer data. Fine. An inconvenience, yes, but I get it.

Or, they make that data available only through Webmaster tools, which seems fair, because at that point you’ve gone through a measure of authentication.

How do you explain the gross hypocrisy of not encrypting paid searches? This could be their out, a calculated flaw that allows them to inject some rhetoric, in the event that they decide to revert away from signed-in SSL. “The technical limitations that Web-wide SSL browsing posed proved to be insurmountable bla bla…”

Is this just a ploy to push Google Analytics Premium?

Eh. That doesn’t make sense to me. They’d essentially be declaring GA impotent. The value of the free data they receive from Google Analytics is more valuable than what they’d make from GA Premium. Not to mention that they’d be creating another political firestorm.

Am I being naive in assuming Google will stick to their do-no-evil philosophy? I sure hope not.

The post SEO Implications of Google Encrypted Search appeared first on 435 Digital.

You can certainly track the basic statistics like visits, page views and bounce rates (i.e. how many users clicked off your website after just one pageview). But you can also track more complex statistics. Statistics like which keyphrases drove which traffic to your website, which websites drove traffic to your site and even track how a user clicked through your website.

What’s the best thing about Google Analytics? It is 100% free and very easy to implement.

All you need is a Google Account (like Gmail) and the ability to paste a couple of lines of HTML code into every page of your website (usually done via pasting it into the site’s footer). You don’t need to know HTML. You just need to know how to copy and paste and have access to your site’s code. If you have a blog like WordPress, there are plugins that make installing Google Analytics a snap as well.

The Google Analytics dashboard includes some of the most useful information. It is here where a site owner or online marketer can get a quick snapshot of visits, pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site, percent of traffic that are new visits, graphs of traffic trends, maps of geographic traffic sources and even a pie chart of traffic sources by type (direct traffic, search engines, referring sites, etc.). The dashboard even includes the five pages that receive the most traffic across your website. Again, all of this information is FREE!

For those that want to get their hands dirty, Google Analytics offers more advanced options such as:

1.    Mobile stats – Discover which cell phones or mobile devices your users are on when they access your website. Alternatively, discover which mobile carriers your site visitors are on when they visit your site. This will help you to build the proper experience for those users and focus on the platforms that are most prevalent.

2.   In-Page Analytics – Ever wonder where people are clicking on your pages? Which links? Which images? Which navigational elements are attracting the most clickthroughs? Now you will know. Just go to the Content section and click on In-Page Analytics and Google Analytics will do an overlay of any page on your website with fancy little bubbles pointing out what percentage of people click where. It’s slick. You’ll love it! Yeah, yeah it’s still in ‘beta’ but so was Gmail until just a few years ago.

3.    Custom Reports – If you want to look like a rockstar to your boss or your team, use this function to automate reports in whatever format you wish. It can even be scheduled and sent out to email.

4.   More, More and More – Just start digging around. The genius over at Google are constantly adding new, cool features. Don’t worry, you won’t ‘break’ anything.

How often should someone check Google Analytics? Really that depends on you. Typically, an ecommerce site or mid-sized blog would check Google Analytics daily. Smaller sites may only need to check it weekly however. If you are really obsessed with stats, you can even setup a flat screen TV that displays the stats live. Tribune does this with the majority of their websites like LATimes.com, ChicagoTribune.com, KTLA.com, etc.

It really depends on how vital you feel it is to your company’s success. General rule, check it each morning. This allows you to be aware of any traffic anomalies and react accordingly.

If you are small business owner, the data from Google Analytics will be some of the most useful information you will gather. It will provide great detail on what your customers are most interested in from a product/content aspect, where people are losing interest (exit rates) and—perhaps most importantly—how people are discovering your company.

Be sure to react to what you see and look deeper than just ‘Top 10″ data that Google Analytics displays by default. Learn how to use Microsoft Excel well and export your data from Google Analytics to Excel. Do a few pivot tables to really crunch the data.

So, go get Google Analytics at: http://www.google.com/analytics and put it on your site right now and enjoy geeking out on all the data by tomorrow morning.

The post SEO Tips: How a small business can use Google Analytics appeared first on 435 Digital.

Web analytics are important for optimizing web usage and play an important role in everything from marketing to accounting. Even if a company has a person solely dedicated to maintaining analyitcs, it is important for everyone to have a basic understanding to learn more about your consumer.

There are a lot of different dimensions to web analytics, but to start off, the three most important stats on are bounce rate, time on site and unique visitors. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who exit the site after the landing page. Like your golf score, you want your website bounce rate to be low. The main objective should be for visitors to click on other pages to your site from the landing page. A simple way to do this is to add hyperlinks into your website copy directing traffic to other areas of the website. It is important for all internal hyperlinks to open up in the same window to decrease site bounce rate. Landing pages can be customized based on keywords when the traffic source is from a search engine.

Though a valuable statistic, bounce rate can be misleading if the landing page is a homepage with a substantial amount of information or a blog. This is when “time on site” becomes useful. Similar to bounce rate, looking at a website’s “time on site” data, one can tell how long visitors are spending on a website and in what areas. This is especially important for businesses to learn the wants and needs of their consumers. 435Digital.com’s analytics indicate visitors want to learn more about social media through our blog posts, hence the creation of Social Media A-Z.

While it is important to know where people are spending their time, it is essential to know who is visiting your site. Unique visitors are the number of unduplicated visitors to your website in a given time. Analytics usually break down data every 24 hours and categorize it by month. Therefore, a unique visitor will only be counted once per day but may visit your site twice a week. To know how many “regulars” your website has, analyze the new vs. returning data.

To get an idea on how many times a person visits your website, divide total visits by unique visitors to get “average number of sessions per unique visitor.”  Knowing how often people visit your site can help you determine how many times you should update your content.

If you or employees visit your website frequently, it is important to make sure these are not interfering with your web analytics. To make sure you are getting the most accurate information install filters on certain IP addresses.

The most popular analytics platform is Google Analyics. It allows you to add a filter in your analtyics settings by going to your filter manager and clicking, create new filter. Depending on what IP address you are blocking, you can name the filter: home computer, work, laptop etc. Google has made it easy by doing the work for you, simply select predefined filter and type in the IP address.

Web analytics are a very powerful tool that when utilized can improve your business and highlight needs you may not have otherwise identified. To get a basic understanding, it is important to know your website’s bounce rate, time on site and unique visitors… and of course, keep reading 435′s Social Media A-Z!—DANNI WYSOKI

The post 435 Social Media A-Z: A is for Analytics appeared first on 435 Digital.

Every company’s social media goals are different, and the reasons for measuring engagement will be different, too. Even so, here are three metrics you may want to consider when measuring social media engagement for your brand:

1.) Avg. # of comments per update
Whether it’s a blog post or a Facebook status update, consider looking at the number of comments as a way to measure fan interest and engagement. If you’re not getting much response from your posts or status updates and it’s a goal of yours, maybe it’s time to take a look at why. Do you finish off your posts with a question or discussion point? Are your posts challenging, colorful or incisive? What can you do to get the conversation started?

2.) # of retweets per topic
If you’re trying to build engagement on Twitter, you want to have content that is sharable. Retweets aren’t the sole metric of Twitter success, but if you want your brand and message to have reach, than the retweet is key. The more your fans share your message, the more your social media audience grows.

3.)Twitter/Facebook to website clickthrough rate
If you’re using social media as a strategy to build traffic to your website, then looking at your social media clickthrough rate is essential. You can track clicks through using a URL shortener like bit.ly or by using web analytics tools like Clicky or Google Analytics. Just because your fans find your Facebook content engaging doesn’t necessarily mean they are taking the time to visit your website as well. Give your social media fans a reason to visit often by linking to new and updated website content, whether it’s a new blog post from staff or a new product for sale.

For all of these metrics, the best way to get real insight from these numbers is to look at trends, not just isolated daily numbers.

Keep an Excel spreadsheet of your engagement metrics, and then cross-reference that with a calendar of your social media campaign tactics. That way you’ll be able to better track whether it was your cool Facebook contest from last month or your hot viral video from two weeks ago that delivered more buzz or traffic to your website.

How does your company measure engagement via social media?—KEIDRA D. CHANEY

The post 3 Ways to Measure Social Media Engagement appeared first on 435 Digital.

ReadWriteWeb confirmed that Twitter will be rolling out new real times analytics with a beta launch in Q4.

I am an analytics/data nerd, and I am ridiculously stoked. Apparently the folks at Twitter acquired analytics startup Trendly and will be absorbing it into the Twitter functionality. According to ReadWriteWeb:

“The product will leverage algorithms similar to the Twitter Resonance concept,” Justin Kistner writes on the WebTrends blog, “in order to show users which tweets are spreading, who is influential in their network, and more. The emphasis is on real time in order to help users make adjustments on the fly to their tactics.”

This is great, and I really hope they will expand the offering to include Twitter integration/retweeting from websites and blogs as a metric as well.

This is awesome and big and a wonderful complement to the data that Facebook provides through insights. Good job, @ev and the gang.—KEIDRA D. CHANEY

The post Data Geeks Rejoice! Twitter to Add Real Time Analytics! appeared first on 435 Digital.

There’s a ton of tools and apps (Klout, Clicky, Twitalyzer, Facebook Page Insights) out there designed to measure social media traffic and engagement, but even so a baseline method of measurement hasn’t yet been established, which can be frustrating for marketers. It’s really easy to get bogged down in numbers and data that are interesting, but ultimately, meaningless when it comes to figuring out your bottom line. So where do you start?

First things first, you don’t have to measure everything.

The best way to attack social media measurement is to establish what your social media objectives are before you start: Are you using social to drive traffic to your company website? Do you want to expand your brand recognition in a new market? Are you using social media for lead generation? Identify the metrics that will give you the insights to answer those questions.

So for example, if your company is using Twitter to drive daily traffic to your website, looking at the number of daily @ mentions won’t help you much, you’ll have to start looking at your visitor numbers from Twitter to your website. If you are looking to expand your market in a new area using Facebook, tracking your new fan count in that particular location will be useful for you, however.

The key is identifying the metrics that measure your company’s objective. There’s no one size fits all with this. The more specific your company’s social media objectives are, the more refined your measurement can be. This could mean as little as 5 – 6 metrics that work for you. Imagine that! No more being bogged down with tons of stats and pages of spreadsheets. You can be lean and mean, and only track the numbers that directly affect your bottom line. Good luck!—KEIDRA D. CHANEY

The post Measuring Social Media ROI Doesn’t Have to Be Tedious! appeared first on 435 Digital.