Moderator: Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance.com

Speakers:

Rich Devine, Director of Search, ZAAZ
Dennis Hart, Vice President, SE Jones, LLC
Ryan Lash, Vice President, Search, ymarketing
Ian Lurie, CEO, Portent Interactive

My last lunch of SMX West hit the spot. This session is sure to do the same. Dennis is up first.

He wants to challenge us to think of the goals of your site before you set up an AdWords strategy. They categorize customer needs with some of the first questions they ask them. How many hits can we get? Not a great sign. How can we get more data? Also needs coaxing to get them thinking in the right direction.

What is User Engagement?

• Turning on a prospect and surrounding them with useful information.
• A deeper understanding of site visitor behavior and intent.
• Rarely possible in one metric or KPI
• Beyond: UX, conversion tracking, or time on site
• Beyond satisfaction: it’s a measure of interest and action and may be represented as loyalty
• Importantly, it requires a plan to measure effectively and affect improvement

Observations

• It’s rare to find a company satisfied with their analytics plan
• Too many confuse reporting with analytics
• Too many suffer from analysis paralysis
• You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s the biggest challenge. Figuring out your marketing goals 6 months or a year from now is hard. But you don’t want to lock yourself into a solution that can’t change with your changing needs.

Analytics Planning Strategies

• Access
  • Do you have access to good data
  • “and” strategy, not “or” (Reflective of Avinash’s comment at this morning’s keynote)
  • There is no perfect or complete tool
• Configuration
  • Conversion metrics (Think of soft conversions as well)
  • Segments
  • KPIs
• Scheduling
  • Reports are not analytics
• Ad Hoc Exploration
  • Plan to fumble around. That’s how you learn.

Here are some search KPI examples (note: all KPIs assume across time)

• SERP rankings for targeted keywords/phrases
• Competitive organic search share for top 200 industry search terms
• Organic search traffic trending

The info in the slide above doesn’t show you compared to what, over time. Plus with new technologies, a single KPI could change meaning over time.

• User engagement KPIs
• Average PVs per visitor from search
• Conversion rate from paid search
• Bounce rate against “competitive benchmark”
  • Review comp sites
• Downloads from socially referred visitors
  • Encourage sharing
• Form completions (leads) from organic
  • Enhance conversion opps on top organic pages

Instead of looking at ranking, it can be better to look at “Breadth and Depth”:

• Breadth=total traffic from organic search
• Depth=total number of keywords from organic search

Ryan is next. He says there are lots of metrics that can be measured and he just threw out 20 different acronyms. So much data, so little time. So what to do about it?

1. Stare at your screen
2. Spreadsheets
3. Take a stab in the dark
4. Or take a step back and audit the situation.

Did you say audit? They take a long time and can be painful. But it gets results. So what to expect?

WoW

• CPC -74 percent

MoM

• PPC CR +264 percent
• SEO CR +250 percent

YoY

• Leads +40 percent
• Cost per lead -40 percent
• Orders +54 percent

With an audit you come up with an actionable plan based on analysis of results.

The PPC scorecard:

1. quantitative
2. qualitative
3. unique KPIs

Here are 20 questions that speak to 1 and 2 above.

1. Number of PPC accounts
1=1, 2=2, 3=3, 4=4, 5(+)=5

2. Number of campaigns in an account
1=1, 2=2, 3-5=3, 6-10=4, 11(+)=5

3. Number of ad groups per campaign
1=1, 2-5=2, 6-10=3, 11-19=4, 20(+)=5

4. Total number of keywords across an account
0-100=1, 101-1,000=2, 1k-5k=3, 5k-20k=4, 20k(+)=5

5. Number of active keywords per ad group
1=1, 1,000(+)=2, 51-1,000=3, 6-50=4, 2-5=5

6. Number of text ads across entire account
1=1, 2-5=2, 6-10=3, 11-19=4, 20(+)=5

7. Active text ads per ad group
1=1, 8(+)=2, 5-7=3, 2-3=4, 3-4=5

8. Unique landing pages
1=1, 2-5=2, 6-10=3, 11(+)=4, Infinity (multivariate testing)=5

9. Number of goals (conversion events)
1=1, 2=2, 3=3, 4=4, 5(+)=5

10. Bid rules
0=1, 1=2, 2=3, 3=4, 4(+)=5

11. Budget
Non-specified=1, account level=3, campaign level=5

12. Keyword match types
Broad=1, broad+negative=2, exact=3, phrase=4, embedded=5

13. Conversion tracking
Search Engine=1, Customized SE=2, Google Analytics=3, Customized GA=4, Paid analytics=5

14. Campaign update frequency
Annually=1, Monthly=2, Weekly=3, Daily=4, Intraday=5

15. Call tracking
None=1, One TFN=3, Multiple TFNs=5

16. Bid management
None=1, Manual=2, Conv. Optimizer=3, 3rd party=4, 3rd party w/ attribution=5

17. Landing page testing tools
None=1, Manual=2, Free (WSO)=3, Customized WSO=4, Paid w/ Segmenting=5

18. Campaign settings
None=1, Location Based=2, Network Selection=3, Bidding/Budget=4, Advanced=5

19. Text ad copy
DKI=1, Static=2, DKI+Static=3, DKI+Static+Custom Display URLs=4, High KW Dense Converting Static=5

20. Retargeting/Remarketing
Never heard of it=1, w/ Text Ads=3, w/ Display Ads=5

Now tally up your score.

D: 20-50
C: 51-70
B: 71-90
A: 91-100

Rich takes the podium next. They focus on the intersection of creative and data. You can be both, and here’s a new hybrid approach.

Agenda:

• Goals driven analytics
• Beyond the conversion
• Monetization modeling
• Some examples

When we succeed with clients, 5 characteristics pop out

1. They know analytics and technologies
2. They seek first to know their business and goals
3. They seek to improve access and appetite for data – upward and across the organization
4. They focus strictly on actionable data that empowers stakeholder decision making
5. They don’t avoid the weeds, but they don’t get stuck in them either

Getting Started

Identifying stakeholders :

1. Ask really good questions
2. Identify their unique business objectives
3. Roll up stakeholder feedback
4. Define collective business goals
5. Review and seek consensus across stakeholders

Business goals dictate site goals, which inform other digital channel goals.

• Less is actionable
• More is nice to know, or at worse, paralyzing
• Okay to have sub-goals

Looking Beyond Conversion

There’s a lot of site traffic but only a small portion of that is measured as success. All the other activity also has success, so they try to understand the value of it. They build models that define the money value of micro-conversions. They are custom-built performance models.

Examples:

Use monetization to guide project or optimization priority. Score each project for size of opportunity, ROI, and business priority. Weight each score to determine an aggregate weighted score. Use score to guide decisions, not as an absolute rule. As revenue / cost estimates are revised, so is the monetization model.

What’s the opportunity cost of in-action? This is very effective for justifying longer-term, higher-cost projects.

Ian is our final speaker. (BTW, check out our awesome interview from this week’s SEM Synergy!) He says he’s going to get into the weeds. Who has seen a raw log file? A good number of people have, so he says this shouldn’t be too awful.

If you stick your head in the sand, the only thing you can out of is your bum. With organic search, worry about three things:

• Opportunity
• Competition
• Attribution

Opportunity and competition are about optimization, improving rankings on terms you want. Attribution is about keeping your job, showing evidence that what you’re doing is working, and if you need to do more of one thing or another.

Keyword driven research isn’t bad, but you have to look at other things first. You’ll miss opportunities for keywords that are almost on page one. You’ll miss the opportunity gap. If you can follow that up with a narrow competition gap, that’s a good position to be in.

Step 1 is to determine opportunity. Start by looking at pages, which pages are getting the most pages from organic search. For each of those pages, look at which organic keywords are driving traffic to those pages. Now look at keyword data. If you see 2,900 searches for your keyword, and 250 visitors from that term, there’s an opportunity gap. The question now is, can I compete. He recommends the Keyword Difficulty Tool or SEO for Firefox that show you how hard it is to compete on a term.

Now you can optimize the ranking page. Link to newer content to drive people to updated content on your site. A tool that will show clicks from page 2 and one that will show pages with no clicks, will help you.

The only way to do attribution is to learn to love your log files. Scrub the log file so all you have are pages, and sort traffic by cookie and IP address.

I betcha Ian will post these on his vimeo!

[Ian also shared his Google Analytics Cheatsheet. --Susan]

Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Today’s episode of SEM Synergy features tech news of the week, tips for brainstorming new content ideas, and an incredibly insightful sit down with accomplished Internet marketer Bryan Eisenberg.

Bryan talked about a couple of his passions on the program today, conversion optimization and copywriting, though he frequently lends his expertise elsewhere, such as in the pages of his NYT best-selling books, at conferences, and in interviews, like the one below:

In this interview, Bryan asks a question:

50 years ago let’s say you had an extra million bucks, and you had the opportunity to invest in one of two companies: GM or Toyota. Who would you have invested in 50 years ago?

Now, I love this question because from the position we’re standing in today, we know which answer is the most profitable. And yet, at the same time, we know that if we had been in that hypothetical situation, we would have made the wrong choice.

We wouldn’t have made the wrong decision due to a lack of consideration, but when it came to GM 50 years ago, all signs pointed to yes. So Bryan asks the next logical question:

What happened, what changed fundamentally? Well, it used to be that you could survive with marketing and innovation, but times have certainly changed.

Have they ever! In the last 10 years alone, the rate of progress has skyrocketed, which means either exciting or scary times for business. It’s exciting on the one hand because of the understanding that the bar may be higher but the reward is greater. On the other hand, there’s a glaring realization that if you screw it up now, everyone will be able to see the egg on your face.

So what is it that worked for Toyota so well? Bryan tells us:

But what really works so well for them, more importantly, is that after the war Edward Deming came over to them, taught them about total quality management, and taught them about the concept of kaizen, right, continuous improvement. And that’s been the fundamental thing. They didn’t worry about innovations, because innovations they can grab from other people and improve upon those.

The need for continuous improvement is magnified in today’s fast-paced world. Not only must a business keep pace with the change, but they must also continue to improve their offerings to suit the evolving needs of the consumer. And there’s really only one place to start this effort — Web analytics.

In Bruce’s annual preview of the SEO industry in the year to come, he predicts that 2010 will be the year of Web analytics. With personalization of search results and increasingly tight competition online, tracking behavior and measuring conversions will be undeniable needs as time goes on.

Don’t allow your business to be blindsided by this emerging reality. Track, test and measure for your greatest opportunity for success. Thanks to Bryan Eisenberg for illustrating the concept so beautifully, and for being our guest on the podcast today!

SEO Story Time with Bryan Eisenberg — SEM Synergy Extras was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Are you ready for this? Today’s episode of BC’s weekly podcast, SEM Synergy, is dedicated to Web analytics and intelligence. Our guests are Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, and Daniel Waisberg.

… I know!

Avinash Kaushik is one of the foremost experts in Web analytics, author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day, and analytics evangelist for Google. Daniel Waisberg is the chair of marketing of the Web Analytics Association and holds a M.Sc. in Operations
Research and Decisions. And Jim Sterne is the founding chair of the Web Analytics Association and founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. And all three of them are talking about forward-thinking analytics on today’s podcast.

When you’re looking at data, you’re really looking at people.

New practices and strategies are emerging in the study and practice of Web analytics. However, many businesses are still trying to catch up with current analytics best practices. The majority of evangelism is concerned with getting the high-level buy in to collect and analyze comprehensive clickstream data.

But conventional clickstream analysis is limited in the data it provides. Little to no attention is given to secondary or microconversions — the actions that don’t bring in money right now but are a good indicator of relationships built and long-term value. All the focus is put on the money coming in from traditional conversions like how much a visitor spent on products.

By not measuring actions like signing up for an email list, becoming a fan on Facebook, printing out maps and son on, you fail to measure the full value of the site. The next age of analytics — one focused on customer interaction in all its forms — is upon us.

If I learned just one thing in my conversations with Avinash, Daniel and Jim, it’s that marketers need to reevaluate what they’re trying to do with a Web site, and then focus their efforts around that. Start by figuring out all the jobs a web site is trying to do, and then figure out how to measure these objectives.

Analytics 2.0 proposes a framework that helps companies focus on customers, and actionable customer-centricity is really the next frontier of data analysis and analytics. The topic will be examined during eMetrics Summit in Washington D.C. and is the main issue covered in the upcoming paper by Avinash and Daniel, Web Analytics 2.0: Empowering Customer Centricity – Part II (part 1 is available now as a PDF from SEMJ.org). But if you can’t wait until then, check out our interviews below.

Thanks again to my distinguished guests for coming on the podcast this week!

Focusing on the Customer with Analytics 2.0 – SEM Synergy Extras was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

There are two seemingly contradictory approaches to life success. Okay, there are more like four billion approaches and possibly even more contradictions, but follow along with me anyway.

The one school of thought says that those who find the most success in life are those who push their way up the mountains of adversity. They’re the fighters. The never give-uppers. The try-try-againers. We’ll call these the type As.

Alternately, you’ll find those who argue that success comes to those who go with the flow of the current. They’re the adapters. The que-sera-seras. The feel-it-outers. These will be our type Bs.

Of course, as we all know, it really takes both. And in the business world, as in life, SEOs are best positioned for success if they consider when to forge the path ahead and when to ride the wave.

But before I continue, please know what I’m not talking about. Pushing your way toward success isn’t about being inflexible or exhausting. And going with the flow isn’t about giving up or not trying. Oh, I guess that is what I’m talking about. Success in life and business isn’t rooted in extremism. It’s about fitting the approach to the situation. Too simple? Well what about in the following sticky situations of search engine optimization?

In Online Marketing

When Twitter came around in 2006, who knew it would explode into the booming utility it is today? But today we can see the gap between the early adapters, like Dell and Zappos, and those who joined the party late. It’s worth noting that it’s never too late to jump in.

But it gets tricky when the type As are fighting against the current. Social media isn’t going anywhere. The Rupert Murdochs of the world — those who are desperate to fit the new media peg into the old media hole — are likely going to do their business a disservice.

On the other side of the coin we see businesses so quick to jump on the bandwagon and engage the audience that they start their efforts before doing their homework. They may not realize that there’s a back-and-forth element required of social media, or that you don’t have to throw your hands up when faced with a reputation nightmare sparked by an angry and chatty customer.

In Customer Relationships

All SEOs realize that they’re doing double duty when optimizing a site. They’re working to appease two audiences of the site — the search engine and the human user. Pleasing the search engine is certainly rewarding, but a spider isn’t going to convert. The customer is the key.

So it’s almost unimaginable that sometimes we get blinders on and fall into the trap of type A SEO extremism. Optimizing only for search doesn’t account for the many other resources available to improve and develop online marketing efforts aimed at people. Analytics data acts as valuable Web intelligence that can inform the way you speak to customers. And usability should be a consideration since it’s people, after all, that must comfortably navigate the site at the end of the day.

Our type Bs, meanwhile, might succumb to data overload. Someone can sift through analytics ’til the sun sets, but action and implementation has to happen before anything faces the customer. Getting wrapped up on the findings revealed from customer data is tempting, but a push has to be made to act on it.

In Working with Other Departments

SEO relies on the cooperation of many other departments — IT, marketing, branding, PR, the list goes on. And buy-in at the highest levels is required before fruitful relationships are formed and search engine optimization becomes a true consideration of the business.

It’s long been said at search conferences, that SEO should be involved from the very beginning of any online project because the cost of retrofitting a site for SEO is much higher than if it’s built in from the beginning. But care should be taken when pushing the search engine optimization agenda without any give and take. It’s a fast way to alienate team members, whose cooperation and SEO relies on.

At the other extreme, a type B is going to run into trouble when it comes to SEO evangelism. Not all businesses have bought in to why search engine optimization could work for them. In that case, it takes persistence and a passion to educate before the bonds of understanding are made.

As with all things, there’s a time and a place to push hard for search engine optimization interests and there’s a time to follow the current to the next tactic or approach. Don’t be so hard-headed that you miss the next big thing. Don’t be so malleable that you never commit to anything. And don’t be afraid to swim upstream or float downstream when the situation calls for it.

When to Push and When to Flow in SEO was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

The advanced SEO roundtable — undoubtedly one of the most packed sessions of the show. People are lining the walls for this one. Should be awesome! Our moderator is Richard Zwicky, Founder & CEO of Enquisite. Our distinguished speakers are:

• Matthew Bailey, SES Advisory Board & President, Site Logic Marketing
• Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
• Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board Co-Chair
• Todd Friesen, VP Search, Position Technologies
• Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl

Matthew Bailey, Todd Malicoat, Todd Friesen, Mike Grehan, Bruce Clay and Richard Zwicky

Why can big organizations get away with more than little ones?

Mike: User expectations is what it comes down to. A user expects a company like BMW to come up for their search for German automobiles. When they were penalized, they were back fast because of that user expectation.

Matt: He had a good business for a while in cleaning sites up that had been pulled because it was usually caused by amateur mistakes.

Bruce: How many in the audience had a site get pulled? [About five hands go up.] How many knew they were doing something wrong when they did it? [A few raise their hand. Mike calls them naughty!]

When a search engine penalizes a site, is it ever motivated by the engine’s desire to preserve their image?

Todd F: Again, it’s about user expectation. It’s not as much about Google’s brand. It’s what a user wants to find in search results, because if they don’t find it in Google, they’ll go to another engine.

Bruce: There was a session in which Matt Cutts indicated that there are sometimes a large section of an account that will be dropped, and maybe not the whole thing. Part of the penalty that Google can apply is partial blocking of a site.

Todd F: If you’re a really big brand, it may be worth the links to get banned. BMW was getting a lot of links at the time as the story was covered. And when the site came back, they had the positive effect of linking.

Matt: It’s ironic BMW got busted for what they were doing considering they didn’t have to do it in the first place. They were a strong brand.

Can you please discuss buying links? When I buy a press release in PR Web, I’m pretty much buying links.

Todd M: If you buy direct links, only do a small number. Approach it as a partnership, form a relationship. And of course optimize the link.

Mike: At the end of the day, who’s Google to tell you what link you can put on your site? But if you’re thinking of why you need to buy links, maybe there’s a reason you can’t get a natural link. Ask why you built the site in the first place.

Todd: If you’re going to buy links, get professional help on that. You can do it, you just gotta do it right. You have to keep it ant a low percentage. You want to hide it or blend it in.

Bruce: If you’re a local business, get local links. Build in obsolescence in your link program so they rotate through.

How do you manage pages that fall in and out of the index on a daily basis? How do you group keywords into an actionable reporting function?

Matt: Rely heavily on analytics, which he believes is what advanced SEO comes down to. Rather than where am I for this term, ask where you are in the family of the term. And then sub-segment that out. What are the most consistent segments of that word? It’s much more useful to look at slices rather than in aggregate.

Todd F: The total number of unique search queries is obviously very high. That’s a ridiculous number of keywords to manage. So they focused on the front end, the top 1000 that actually drive 99% of the revenue. Also take into account on-site search because if they got to that landing page, that wasn’t what they were looking for.

Should we make a policy for getting links back from charitable donations?

Todd: Don’t make it a policy — that’s kind of… sleazy. But if you ask, nine out of ten times they’ll do it.

What about purchasing links on high-quality sites that don’t actually relate?

Mike: Cross-promotions, sponsorships, joint ventures — links come as a byproduct of doing great business.

Todd F: Google can discount links at the link level. So a lot of what you see as blatant paid linking, probably isn’t’ working anyway.

Matt: If you look at the best link building companies, they’re doing business and adding value. Value propositions through marketing is what it ultimately comes down to.

Mike: Backlink checkers only tell you what’s happening right now.

Todd M: You can stretch relevancy in a lot of ways, but it has to be targeted at a page level. The stretches should happen deeper in the site.

Todd F: If you do start getting links on a viral article or video, be careful of the fact you’re going to dilute your site theme. Stretching relevancy is fine, but be careful how far you stretch it because you don’t want to dilute the topic of the site.

If you combine Bing and Yahoo!’s best algorithms, will it matter? What is the effect of the partnership on SEO?

Mike: I think it’s great. Why do SEOs talk about the next Google killer? The difference is a huge change in Bing’s results once they get access to Yahoo!’s historical data. You’re going to see much more relevant results.

Todd F: If Bing results just went over to Yahoo!, that’d be a disaster. Bing is a mess. But it would be nice to dust off our old tools from 2002 because those would start working again. Also, he hopes to see paid inclusion stay around.

Matt: Search is going to become more of an experience, and that could be good competition.

Mike: It’s the end of an era. Crawling the Web as far as search is concerned has reached its limits. That’s why he talks about new signals. Everyone’s looking to get data in real time. It gives Microsoft that one step up in hanging on to the current phase of search.

Todd M: Again, analytics is what advanced SEO is about. But the difference between Bing and Yahoo! is a different kind of user than Google. Ecommerce sites convert better. 200 visitors from Yahoo/Bing could be better than 2,000 from Google. The volume might not be high, but when Windows 7 comes out, he predicts more people will be using the engine because it’s the default.

Bruce: Traffic will likely go up if relevancy goes up. Yahoo! has a lot of technology. They bought a lot of algorithm heavy weights. They have a better algorithm than Bing. Combine the algorithms with the Yahoo! data, and you could end up with a power player.

Todd F: He honestly sees the Bing algorithm go “boop!”

Is there any benefit from reciprocal links?

Todd F: It’s heavily discounted.

Mike: If you’re linking all your sites together, what’s the value?

What about search suggest? How can we get there?

Matt: There are a lot of angry, bitter suggestions. The question is raised, how often is something searched on to show up in search suggest. By typing in “how 2″ you’ll find things like “how 2 buy drugs.” If you look for “how does one” you’ll find “how does one split an atom.” It’s an insight into the searcher mind.

Does siloing still matter? What about siloing in pyramid form?

Bruce: Theme-aligned content structure. It’s not about nofollow. It’s about keeping content from bleeding across all parts of the site. It’s about lining up content to the way people search. He’s been doing the practice for six years, with minimal nofollow usage. The use of nofollow was brought up when Matt Cutts commented about nofollow for PR sculpting. But he believes the nofollow issue is not exactly understood and probably doesn’t work the way people think it works.

Mike: Nofollow is bunk. The three engines came together for this protocol. But why have it there if you don’t want it followed.

Todd F: The conspiracy theory over nofollow is that search engines will know what sites are being SEO’d based on the occurrence of nofollow. But to back up to siloing, he looks it as proper architecture for your Web site. Keep it focused all the way through.

I’m spending a ton of time and money creating unique content and distributing it across a network. How can I do this without duplicate penalties?

Todd F: Google’s really good at detecting duplicate content. Where you can, try rewriting, re-titling, and so on, but at some point there’s a diminishing return. You have to pick with publication is going to take the lead at certain times.

Matt: Rely on local properties to localize the content. It’s a tough model, and he’s seeing a huge rethinking of strategy in the publishing industry.

Bruce: If it’s duplicate, one will be filtered, and if it’s syndicated by a higher authority site, they could rank instead of the original creator. There are also instances where there are words dynamically replaced. That’s more considered spam.

Mike: There has to be some kind of white listing. He asked someone at an engine if duplicate filtering was on all the time. Every university has this manual on their site, so does that mean every university is going to be filtered? There’s got to be analysis on when it should be filtered and when not.

Todd M: It’s hard to argue against duplication consolidation when you consider site quality scoring — if there is such a thing. Even the publishing industry will need to consider this.

The best analytics tracking package is blank.

Todd F: His favorite is Core Metrics. Omniture is a beast to set up. Google is free. Enquisite has a free trial period. Look at what you need to do and what package will meet those needs.

Mike: He agrees with Todd. A hammer to crack a nut might be too much technology for you.

What do you recommend when a term gets localized and ten spots pop up at the top of the results?

Everyone: First get into the local results if you can.

Todd F: Localization is getting so broad now. Local results show up for queries that don’t even have a city name now. And you can’t use a P.O. box. There are places that are re-mailers that will forward your mail to wherever.

Mike: Get a paid listing.

Todd M: You can do re-mailing for your top offices and locations. Include those office addresses on your contact page. You won’t be across the board anymore.

What are your thoughts on Caffeine?

Todd F: Everything he’s checked on it is relatively at the same position as it was before. It’s less an algo shift as it is an infrastructure shift.

Bruce: Some of the spammier sites have dropped.

Mike: The end user expects the freshest results. Crawling the Web has always been about lateral results. So the intention is to speed up the process within the HTTP protocol we’re working with.

Todd M: When there are significant changes, it can take up to six months to find out how it will affect the search industry.

We’ve invested heavily in PR and the links have done nothing for our rankings.

Mike: You probably won’t. The notion of a press release isn’t to get the links. You want the guy at the Wall Street Journal to write about your press release and get one big link.

Todd F: Be judicious with the topics of your press release.

Matt: Are your targets those newspapers that after 30 days the article is in archive and then it’s behind a registration wall? Target publications with longer lasting links.

I thought login pages were a good place to use nofollow, but Matt Cutts told me take them all off. And my observation has been that Google hasn’t taken all their nofollows off. What’s going on?

Todd F: He’s seeing that nofollow is just evaporating PageRank, not consolidating it. He doesn’t see a reason to use it

Mike: He never gave nofollow a second thought — never bothered with it. Use robots.txt if there’s something you don’t want in the index.

Do you still think all press is good press?

Todd F: Yeah, even bad press gets links. But it depends on what the business goals are. If you can avoid bad news, avoid it. There are sites out there like RipOffReport that can take control of your SERPs.

What are the most obvious questions that customers don’t ask when engaging an SEO program that they should be aware of and plan for?

Matt: There’s still a focus on rankings and not business model and revenue. That’s an old mentality and it’s not necessarily the case.

Todd F: Clients don’t understand the space. If you ask, “who are your competitors for your shoe store?” they say Nike, Adidas, etc. But really it’s Zappos. They can’t get their head around who their online competition is. The other big issue is that they want certain major traffic keywords, when those words don’t convert.

Bruce: They often don’t know what their key performance indicators are. A lot of people have been flying blind and don’t have a sense of how to measure the success of an SEO program.

Matt: There’s no concept of what it takes to compete in certain spaces. The days of the little guy competing against the big guy are long gone in many verticals.

Mike: And look at the whole marketing strategy of competitors — not just online. If a competitor is spending money on TV ads and other channels too, then are you prepared to do the same?

Advanced SEO Roundtable: What Is It Really? And Where Is It Going? was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Our moderator is Jeff Ferguson, SES Advisory Board & Senior Director, Online Marketing, Local.com. Our speakers are:

• Thomas Bindl, Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
• James Colborn, Director, Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft
• Aiko Yoshikawa, Sr. Product Manager, Convergence, Yahoo! Advertising Products Group
• Leigh McMillan, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Marchex Call Analytics
• Niraj Shah, Product Manager, Marin Software

Jeff welcomes the crowd after a nice outdoor lunch. He congratulates us for making it to these last-day sessions. Word. Jeff can remember a time when the biggest metric was hits. Then it was click-through rates. It finally got to a point where you could determine revenue — what a revelation! That was information you couldn’t get from other channels. As programs became more complex, the realization occurred that credit might be attributed to other channels.

The question became, how do you determine attribution? The first man in and the last man in is probably too simple. And what if you’ve got more than one thing to do on your site? All of these things need to be assigned to the right place, lest you cut something that’s not working. That’s the heart of the matter that will be discussed today.

Thomas Bindl

Tom is up first. He’s going to focus on real data for better decisions. Even if you’re able to see the full ROI and channels involved, it’s still hard to believe all the data. In general, cookies get lost. How many days does a third-party cookie survive? After 30 days there is a loss of 21 percent of cookie tracking data. That was determined by setting cookies to users they could identify later, over three sites, covering different topics in different countries. That’s a lot of data that’s going to be wrong.

High AOV may result in less accurate tracking. AOV in travel industry increases over time. The data must be tracked from the first interest to the conversion. A possible customer journey might involve multiple channels that impact the conversion. Display, search and affiliate can all factor in. A quarter of all tracking data is wrong. 25.3 percent of conversions need 2+ clicks.

Attribution management: Why the last click shouldn’t get all the credit

• Try to understand cross-channel effects.
• The brand works better with generic terms.
• Define a value for all clicks that lead to a conversion.
• The longer the sales cycle, the more important attribution management is.
• In doubt credit the last click the most, but not everything.

Even the best technology needs help. There are ways to increase tracking accuracy:

• Store click IDs on your site and return on conversion
• Pass on order/client ID with every conversion
• Local shared objects (Flash cookies — often too slow for redirects)
• Ask your users for channel of origin
• Unique coupon codes

Online and offline rely on each other. How can you actually measure offline conversions?

• Coupon codes are often only generated online, but you can do it vice versa as well. A coupon code given in the store that buys accessories online will be connected to their original purchase.
• Discount IDs in ads and landing pages together with phone numbers.
• Check against prior behavior. A lot of people always take the same path to a site.
• Ask for original/influential channels. Ask the consumer — it actually works!

Jeff asks the panel if putting all consumers in one funnel is a detrimental way of doing business. Tom says that a lot of companies are putting money in channels and not paying attention to what’s happening. But with the technology to actually measure the results is foolish. You get more efficiency to all online marketing channels.

Niraj Shah

Niraj is next.

What are multiple conversion events?

• Visitor actions that indicate engagement
• May be directly revenue generating
• Maybe a sign of interest, future revenue
  • Examples: store locator, sign up for newsletter, offline conversions (click to call), cross sells on thank you page, stages of a sales funnel (application submitted, approved application > registration)

Why use multiple conversion events?

Reporting

• Track conversion events across paid search program.
• Analytics and reporting deliver insight to every level.
  • Which keywords drive new users vs. existing users?
  • Which creative phrases drive store locator but not checkouts
  • Which ad groups have high abandonment rate?

Bidding

• Assign value to conversion events separately.
  • Give credit to keywords driving quality visits
  • Tune bid setting to meet ever changing business goals
  • Examples: month-end blitz to sign up new customers
  • Monetization for cross sells changes
  • Financial markets necessitate shift to affluent clients (vs. mainstream clients)

Reactivity

• When lag from click/revenue event is long (like 30 days)
• Option 1: Wait for latent revenue to trickle in and update bids accordingly
  • Problem: bidding is reacting to changes 30 days late
• Option 2: Monetize intermediate events that have less lag.
  • Advantage: bidding reacts to changes immediately.

How to choose multiple conversion events

• Match conversions events with business metrics and goals.
• Attribute values to events for bidding.
  • Enables SEM program to easily adapt to business goals
  • Examples:
    • Cross sells, offline conversions, ensure keywords get credit
• New vs. existing customers
  • Value new customers based on life time value: 2x initial order
  • Value existing customers at 1/2 of order size
• High end vs. mainstream customers
  • Value high-end customers at 100% of captured revenue
  • Value mainstream customers at 75% of captured revenue

Conversion events aren’t always revenue events:

• Stages of a longer sales cycle
  • Choose proxy value for intermediate stages
  • Regularly review proxy value vs. actual revenues and adjust
• Store locator, newsletter sign up
  • Correlate with offline and future conversations
• Qualify visits
  • Useful for conversations with no explicit link online

Leigh McMillan

Leigh is up next. She’s going to look at leveraging call tracking and analytics — the under utilized advertising intelligence. She asks how many people are with an agency. A few hands go up. How many use call tracking or are familiar with it? About 25 percent raise their hand.

Call tracking is analytics for calls rather than clicks or Web site activity. She’ll refer to it as call analytics. On average calls convert at ten times the rate of clicks. People get to talk through the service or there’s an urgent need.

Overall there’s 23 billion plus estimated calls driven from performance advertising and listings in the U.S. (search, print, yellow pages). That’s a robust source of data. Before, business had no cost-effective way to measure these calls — and the business that results from the calls. What campaign, what time of day, what keyword drove the highest value.

Now, a plethora of call data is available. It can be tracked by source, ad, campaign, keyword, time of day and call duration. With call duration, a baseline of calls helps you analyze and separate sales vs. service calls. Repeat calls, hang ups, missed calls, geo-location, recordings and caller info can also be collected.

Value Proposition of Call Analytics

• Prove ROI
• Capture offline conversions
• Gain advertising intelligence
• Improve sales staff performance

Call analytics measures the action most important to local and service-based businesses. One client saw that three times more conversions were counted because 66 percent of conversions were over the phone.

Who should use call analytics? Any service-based or local business and the agencies that work with them. Not only does the agency get credit but it also acts as intelligence to act on in the future.

• Home services
• Professional services
• Automotive
• Real estate
• Education
• Dining
• Finance
• Insurance
• Business service

How it works:

1. Provision the tracking number.
2. Place the number in an ad, site, landing page, etc. Any marketing where there’s a phone number.
3. Leverage the data to optimize campaigns.

Best practices:

1. Use local numbers whenever possible.
2. Use dynamic number replacement (the site and landing pages based on source can each have a different number through JavaScript).
3. Test and track what you really need.
4. Call-optimize your landing pages.
5. Listen to call recordings.

Evaluating call analytics providers:

• System uptime and infrastructure
• Ease of implementation
• Number of processes available
• [... I missed the rest!]

James Colborn

James will be our next presenter. He’ll look at the normal understanding of search and ROI and how you might also want to think about it, along with possible testing scenarios. How many people in the audience are buying search, display, content and image ads — a good number raised their hands for each one.

How do we think about search ROI today?

Consumer search > Click > Action = Desired ROI

At that action point, we’ve looked at multiple sources for getting the desired ROI. Interestingly, a lot of marketers stop their thinking process at the click. A lot of us also stop at the action point. But he’s going to focus on the first step. What actually prompted them to search for you in the first place?

How should we think about ROI?

Online advertising is accountable and measurable and provides some control. But the downfall is getting to the point of juggling a thousand plates on sticks at the same time. That’s where analytics and understanding come in. How many steps did it take to get to a conversion?

Is it worth trying to spend the right time trying to find the right mix?

Possible testing scenarios:

• Reality is that it’s far easier to do this with technology. But…
• If you don’t control a display budget, content/image ads are available
• Test medias together. You have the last-click data at hand
• Design campaigns to prompt cross-media connection
• Build a control campaign and test against it with multiple campaigns

Aiko Yoshikawa

Aiko will wrap up the presentations with her look at Yahoo! Conversions & Assist reports. Last click may not tell the full story. How do you value attribution across different marketing campaigns? There have been a lot of studies about display and search working best together. Yahoo’s Sponsored Search reports provide into the full story. Conversions = “last click”: prior to conversions. Assists = metric which gives credit to ads beyond the last clicked ads.

What are assists? They’re marketing activities that lead to conversions. Yahoo tracks up to 45 days before the conversion. Assists aid decision making. In the past, a campaign might be discontinued because it’s relatively high CPA. But high assists number would suggest manufacturer should maintain budget for campaign. The assumption was that there was causation involved, not just correlation. This kind of data is available to all Panama advertisers.

The New Search ROI: Measuring More than Conversion was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

For this revealing session we’ve got moderator Craig Macdonald, VP of Marketing & Product Development, Covario. Our speakers are:

• Adam Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing
• Robin Smith, Global Search Marketing Manager, Life Technologies (formerly Invitrogen)
• Gary Milner, Global Marketing Director, Interactive and Teleweb Marketing, Lenovo
• Mark Grote, Sr. Search Advertising Manager, Microsoft

Craig says there’s an old adage: success has many founders but failure is an orphan. If you asked a marketing manager what the result of their campaigns is, everyone would want to take credit for the wins. The issue is attribution modeling and being able to assign credit in multi-channel programs. How do you know you have the right metrics in place to put the right resources into the funnel?

They don’t expect to give us an answer today, but there’s a lot of solid work being done in attribution modeling. How do you coordinate systems and data for attribution modeling. How do you do testing to see the impact of what you’re doing on the conversion funnel? And one overlooked issue they’ll try to approach is governance.

Is paid search overrated and what are the panelists’ organizations doing around attribution modeling. Gary starts by saying if you go back to John Wannamaker’s quote, the traditional ad industry has been rife with wastage. The strategy is to target ad dollars on perceived targets but they’re not always the right ones.

About 15 percent of media investment is in digital. Forrester also expects the number to go to 25 percent in the next few years, but Gary thinks that’s an underestimation. Last click measurement may lead to poor investment decisions and slow the digital investment. Paid search is getting too much or too little credit.

Dependencies:

• Metrics set up as first/last/multi-click
• Organic: is it set up as a campaign?
• How do you measure affiliate?

They did a study to get an idea of how significant the cross-vehicle interaction is in terms of visitors and revenue exchange between marketing programs. They found about half of visitors came directly to the site. They probably heard about the URL elsewhere. About 30 percent is coming from a single touch point, like an affiliate program. 20 percent comes from multi-touch point approach, with the visitor seeing the brand in several places before coming to the site.

So what they learned is that they’re tracking last click as well as an attribution revenue stream based on lifetime value. Set your systems to measure last click and pervasive lifetime value of traffic. Consider third-party solutions to track. Implement a dashboard system for last click and participation revenue. Consider a split dashboard with revenue generation and influence programs.

Robin is up next. She says at her company the standard last-click ROI crediting is used. But she asked, “Is paid search selling or is it an order taker?” She assumes that most spend is in platform or brand terms. She wondered where to spend money if she got additional budget. She wanted a holistic approach to campaigns. She believed she wasn’t making educated decisions and that allocation could be critical to the success or failure to the campaigns. What looked highly profitable could turn out very unprofitable, and vice versa.

In order to calculate ROI correctly and make better decisions, she set out to:

• Justify large budgets for entire purchase funnel and to bring more budgeting dollars online
• Gather all visit data and assigned every visit a unique ID
• Analyze the data and initial findings
• Choose a reallocation method and look for another tool that could do it for us
• Understand that balancing the redirection of revenue is for improving ROI

The reality of ROI crediting should be multi-click. She found that in reality they’d been ignoring over 80 percent of the touch points leading to the conversion.

There are always challenges and risks. It’s very complex because of the amount of data you have to look at. Even with analytics today, it’s hard to make actionable decisions. Sometimes you’ll never get answers to some questions.

Challenges include:

• Technical and resource limitations
• You can easily find yourself in a data tsunami
• Creating clear goals on what you want to achieve
• Minor changes in weight or a variable in formula can make significant changes in performance results
• As a search marketer you many not like what you find

Mark will talk next about Microsoft’s approach to last-click attribution. He asks who in does offline marketing? It’s about 25 percent of the audience. He thinks paid search is indeed overrated. He thinks that search does a little branding, a little awareness, a little selling, but it’s really at the bottom of the funnel. What we’re really looking at is SEM on steroids. We all like the 100 percent accountability of search. He touts that benefit all day long. Nowhere else in marketing is there such clear justification.

But what’s unique about Microsoft, they have multiple goals and layers in a given campaign. Search is one layer, but what’s happening elsewhere in the campaign? There’s a display ad, but we don’t know how that affected a viewer. From a search marketer’s perspective, how do you even begin to analyze that? Add to that multiple languages, multiple campaigns and products, it quickly becomes more complex.

He asked who was in offline marketing because he says any perception shifts are not being measured or even recognized. The solution will have to be through technology. Cookies can probably be used better. But anyone going offsite or off-network, that’s problematic because they lose control of the user. Webtrends and Omniture are used for analytics, and that adds another layer of complexity.

Adam will wrap up the presentations for us. He says that parts of search are and aren’t overrated. To move up the chain of better attribution, he researched the fears and concerns marketers have in attribution management.

Evolution of Attribution Management:

When a client moves from last click to even attribution, they see a lift in performance. The mathematical model is very complex and still developing. Uncertainty is a factor that accounts for things that can’t be tracked yet.

They start by looking at the purchase path of a consumer. Problem recognition leads to information search, then an evaluation of alternatives. The purchase decision is made, then the purchase. When the person navigates to the site for that purchase, all the previous searches and influences aren’t seen. But influencers, introducers, etc., are assigned value in attribution modeling.

When you first start with attribution, you may think you don’t have introducers or influencers. But that’s often because you’ve killed everything but the closers due to the last-click model. You may have to reintroduce them so you can measure their effect.

What’s the biggest challenge?

Adam says first it’s a tech problem. You have to be able to see your path. You’re going to have to put tracking in place in order to get beyond the last click. With the tech in place it could be a testing problem.

Mark says you have to figure out the problem you’re trying to solve and then you have to engineer the tech to help you manage the data. Start slowly with just a few campaigns, improve and streamline the processes and expand.

How’d you get the organization warmed up to this?

Robin says there’s definitely a barrier there but how it started with her organization was through the sales team. She had to set out to prove that the Web does assist in the sale. Gary says it’s not just about click-based modeling, it’s about impression-based modeling. Craig recognizes that there’s a certain maturity that the technology has to reach before attribution modeling can develop.

The Death of Last Click Attribution & Its Impact was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

For our final session of the day, let’s venture into the space of search marketing attribution and performance pricing models. Our moderator is Andy Atkins-Krüger, Managing Director of WebCertain Global Ltd. Our presenters are:

• Paul Wilson, Chief Revenue Officer, iProspect
• Andrew Beckman, President, Location3 Media
• Vivek Bhargava, Managing Director, Communicate 2

The apples to oranges pricing comparisons of Internet marketing (a conundrum broached in a conversation I previously had with Richard Zwicky of analytics provider Enquisite) has so far been an unsolved mystery. Let’s see what our speakers will do to shed light on the issue.

My battery is on the dangerous side of low, so we’ll see what I can manage to report here.

Andy takes the podium and says that the doors are going to be closed in a few minutes and that there should be no tweeting or blogging so that the audience can soak up and process the info. I’m sure he’s talking about everyone but me, right?

Paul is up first and asks for a show of hands of marketers in the room. More than half the audience raised their hand. Now he asks if anyone’s been to a NASCAR race. This time only three or four hands go up. He says that like NASCAR, performance based pricing is a team effort.

There are pros and cons to performance based pricing models vs. standard fee models and percentage of spend models.

Pros:

• Aligns goals
• Incent partner
• Maximize performance
• Protection against non-performance

Cons:

• Constant monitoring of goals
• Accurate tracking data
• Goals change
• SEO vs. Paid
• Over or under performance

The first two cons in the list will probably happen anyway. The others are a little more complicated.

When creating a performance model, there are some different ways to do this:

• Bonus targets
• Incremental fees
• Percentage of revenue

How do I get started?

• Define conversion metrics.
• Define the value of conversions.
• Factor in all costs.
• Pressure test it. If these are the metrics, are they properly aligned with our goals?

There are situations that don’t work for performance based pricing models that are in place. Here are some ideas to make it work.

• You have to start with 12 months of historical data.
• Establish baselines
• Establish the value of the conversion metric
• Perform “what if” analysis — what if there’s a 10 percent increase in cost of applications or a 20 percent increase in revenues?
• Be willing to adjust metrics based on “what if”.
• Write it into the contract
• Consider hybrid models

After all, at the end of the day, we all want to be in the winner’s circle!

Andrew is presenting next. In the beginning search was sold on a CPM basis. The rate card was $60 CPM. Today, pricing models come in a variety of forms, including:

• Cost per sale
• Revenue share
• Cost per lead
• Flat cost

Management fee pros/cons:

Pro: Percentage is fixed; if demand increases for your product or service, you always know what percentage you will pay out.

Con: No incentive for the agency to perform; risk is solely on the advertiser paying a fee, which is not tied into a metric.

Performance-based pros/cons:

Pro: Limited risk for the advertiser; agency pays for clicks and link building so that the site is more effective with generating sales/leads.

Con: Client is “married” to this partner; much data and knowledge are shared with the agency.

How to structure a PPC performance-based deal:

• Flat management fee for 30-90 days, then flip to performance-based if appropriate
• Both you and the agency have an out if necessary
• Flush out the responsibilities of both parties
• Agency research expenses are covered with management fee
• Determine what can be achieved at a reasonable level

Necessities for putting a performance-based PPC campaign in place:

• Site setup fundamentals
• Historical PPC data (at least a year)
• Keywords and ad groups in previous campaigns
• Business data
• Affiliate marketers
• Creative arsenal
• Landing page optimization

How to structure performance-based SEO campaigns:

• Increased organic clicks:
  • You pay for each organic click above the campaign start amount
  • Take benchmark monthly traffic number of non-branded phrases
  • Compensate agency on increased amount of clicks on a CPC basis
• Link acquisition
  • Compensate agency for each free link they acquire
  • Value of each link based on its PR or unique domain
• Submission fee
  • Compensate agency for the amount of submissions they complete
  • Essentially, you pay for the time sent submitting to all outlets

Necessities for putting a performance-based SEO campaign in place:

• Analytics
• Historical SEO data (at least a year)
• Creative arsenal

Issues with CPA models:

Who gets credit for the sale/lead? With multiple online marketing efforts, how do you determine which campaign or agency is responsible for the conversion?

What tools do you use to collect data? Use two during trial period to compare data and deterimine if one is more useful or accurate

Misconceptions of CPA models:

• You can turn over a campaign to the agency and wash your hands of it. Not true! A cooperative relationship with frequent quality communication is key.
• The client always gets the better end of the deal. Hopefully not! It can be a win-win situation.

Remember, any reputable agency will be open to discussing performance-based model with you.

The final presentation comes from Vivek. He starts by twisting the words of John Wanamaker to his liking: “I get paid for half of my advertising efforts. The trouble is, I know which half.” — Vivek Bhargava

If someone said my bounce rate is 90 percent, is this okay, bad or good? A popular blog with a high number of visitors and a high average time spent on the site might have this bounce rate. Don’t judge too quickly.

We may have to reevaluate our important metrics. Consider time spent on site, repeat visitors, clicks from specific profile of prospects and page views per visitor and 100 other metrics. Structure a performance-pricing deal based on the metric the client is really concerned with. Instead of CPC or CPA, think of CPW — cost per whatever.

Structure a win-win for the advertiser and the agency. Choose an all around approach toward measuring and tracking goals. And have a deeper understanding of the value added by each visitor. A performance-based model:

• Ensures everyone works like partners
• Increases innovation
• Helps share the upside with the agency
• Ensures strategy translates into value
• Ensures the optimal distribution of media budgets
• Forces deeper measurement metrics and increased focus on analytics

Performance Pricing Models: What Every CMO Must Know! was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Recent developments, like Microsoft Bing, Google Search Options and Yahoo’s Web of objects strategy, are moving search engines toward more sophisticated models of data visualization. As new, useful ways to present information to the general public are developed, search marketers are reminded that improved data visualization models could benefit the community in many ways.

Photo by Jesslee Cuizon via Creative Commons

During today’s weekly podcast of SEM Synergy, we explored data visualization applications in the search industry. My guest was Richard Zwicky, founder and CEO of Enquisite. Enquisite provides analytics solutions that visually organize and structure data, with paid and organic search professionals in mind. Involved in Internet marketing tracking solutions for almost a decade, Richard has seen an evolution in the display capabilities of analytics solutions, as well as in the expectation of search marketers regarding those display capabilities.

But data analysis is just one of several applications that could be improved through enhanced visualization. Data analysis, data reporting and visual search engines are three platforms in the search industry that will undoubtedly see changes within data presentation in the future.

Visual Data Analysis

Eye-tracking studies, long-tail graphs, map overlays — data can be gathered, parsed and presented in a myriad of visually enhanced ways. The exciting thing about analyzing data visually is how the right format can make hidden trends and findings readily apparent. Knowing that X number of visitors came to your site in a week is great. But seeing the number of visitors to your site over a year represented in a timeline graph? The latter is clearly more valuable. Of course, that same data would be less suited for something like a pie chart or word cluster. The right visual application can relieve an Internet marketer from having to sift through mountains of data in order to locate the important stats and trends.

Visual Data Reporting

As a relatively new profession, Internet marketers can find themselves evangelizing to their clients or company executives about the opportunity of search. With data in hand, the potential of search marketing ROI can be very convincing. Proof is what company execs are looking for, and data makes a great argument. But overzealous search evangelizers should steer clear of overloading listeners with excessive data. It’s important to only present the most useful data in an easy-to-understand visual format. If the person watching the presentation has to decipher how to read the data in the first place, there’s a problem. But if the person watching immediately understands the data by simply looking at the projector, the point has been made.

Search Visualization

Along with data analysis and reporting, data visualization has the potential to aid in the understanding of many topics and concepts. Data visualization uses of the general public are being addressed by a number of visual search engines, like Viewzi and Searchme. About a year ago, Danny Sullivan saw visual search as little more than “eye candy”, explaining that the shortcomings of traditional search were not being addressed by available visual search products; in fact, most of them introduced new problems all their own. Where we’re likely to see real progress in visual search is within the mainstream engines. Google Squared could potentially change searcher behavior and Yahoo’s updated image search demonstrates an improvement on the old standard.

The possibilities for data visualization are endless, and as technology advances, we’re sure to see a growth spurt in the industry. Enquisite is certainly one of the innovators of data visualization for Web analytics, and with a new platform, Enquisite Campaign, now available, do yourself a favor and check them out. Thanks to Richard Zwicky for coming on the show to explain how visualization of data can help with analysis and reporting amongst search practitioners. To find out more from Richard, you can read the Enquisite blog or attend his weekly Ask the Expert round table discussion beginning June 16.

Data Visualization Dresses Up Search – SEM Synergy Extras was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

SES London will be kicking off tomorrow. Last month we brought you interviews with Greg Jarboe and Debra Mastaler, two Internet marketers who will be speaking during SES London.

To close out our series of SES London Q&As, John Marshall, CTO of Market Motive, answered six quick questions. Or six questions quickly. Either way, enjoy!

1. You’ll be speaking on the panel Measuring Success in a 2.0 World. What “cutting-edge” statistics should site owners be paying attention to in a 2.0 world? Have the metrics changed in the new Web environment?

I think the problem is that these cutting edge statistics are getting blunted by the 2.0 world. Increasingly your content exists on websites other than your own, so it’s hard to measure.
2. Search Resources: Building A Better Economic Model is another session you’ll be speaking at. According to the description, part of the premise is that only the measureable marketing activities that prove their worth will survive the chopping block. Have you found that paid and organic search marketing operate with different levels of success or is it like comparing apples to oranges?

You need them both, and neither is headed for the chopping block!
3. Another session you’re speaking on is Landing Page Testing & Tuning. Can you give us a rundown of some of the landing page testing methods that people should have in their arsenal?

With free tools like Google Website Optimizer, the important thing is that you continuously test.
4. You were interviewed here at the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog last May by Lisa Barone. She asked you about the most important metrics to pay attention to, as well as the most overrated. In your opinion, has anything changed since then? Is it still about average time on site (ATOS) and not as much about ROI?

Yes, I’m still a big fan ATOS. ROI is just too complex and prone to problems.
5. What would you say to someone who feels that analytics data is so comprehensive that it’s hard to take action? Are there any reporting solutions available to help this struggling SEO narrow down the actionable items?

If you can’t make sense of ATOS (or its cousin, bounce rate) then you should ignore the web analytics data and survey your customers.
6. While you’re at the conference, what must-see sessions do you plan to attend? Where will other attendees be able to track you down?

I’m really looking forward “Why Does Search Get All the Credit” on Tuesday.

I think John was intentionally coy with his answers so that you, dear readers, would be compelled to attend SES London to find out more. You can also check out his past interview here on the BC blog when John spoke to Lisa in preview of last year’s eMetrics San Francisco. Thanks for stopping by the blog again, John!

Six Questions with John Marshall was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.