SES NY Day 1: Web Analytics
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Hey everyone – I’m Ian Howells, the Director of SEO here at Pepperjam. I’m out at SES NY, and just got out of a workshop titled “Web Analytics: Measuring Success”. The session was moderated by Yosi Herber, the Founder and President of Oxford Hill Partners, LLC. Yosi kicked things off by doing a brief intro of the panel, and giving an overview of the focus of the workshop. The main intention of the session was to dig into how to interpret the data that is collected from your website analytics package. There are countless different analytics packages available, but without knowing what to do with the information they provide, they’re all completely useless. The goal of the panel was to give the audience some actionable ways to take the data provided by their analytics package, and turn them into a strategic plan for optimization.
First up from the panel of speakers was Avinash Kaushik, the author of “Web Analytics – One Hour A Day”. His time was spent on giving a small handful of simple, but very actionable tips.
Tip 1 - Integrate. Using Google Analytics as an example, as a site owner, webmaster, or search marketer, you can view multiple levels of stats including visits, time on site, etc. More importantly, you can assign macro and micro conversions. Macro conversions would include purchases or completed leads. A micro conversion could be anything from an email list signup to a catalog request.
Tip 2 – Bounce rates. Your bounce rate is an extremely important statistic, however it must be segmented. By segmenting your data, you can analyze the success or failure of various traffic streams.
Tip 3 – Experimentation. Using your analytics package to do split testing, you can pinpoint any issues in the landing page design, and potentially problems with ad copy. You do not want to create ads that write checks your website can’t cash. Ensure that your landing page delivers on the promises made by your ad copy, as well as your keyword selection. Use continuous split testing to increase conversion rates, and resolve any issues with usability and design.
Next up was Lauren Vaccarello, the Director of Publishing from FXCM. Her presentation was very entertaining and focused around a few simple steps, and was filled with references to Glengarry Glenn Ross. The first step according to Lauren is to figure out who you are in terms of your website. Do you do lead generation? Are you an information resource? Do you run an ecommerce site that’s focused on making direct sales? It’s extremely hard to do any optimizing without keeping in mind who you are, and what your specific goals include.
Her next step was to follow Gordon Gekko’s 3 Rules to Glengarry Leads. The first rule is to Always Be Converting. If the main point of your website is to make money, don’t stray from that goal. Her next rules focused around making sure you can turn your analytics information into an actionable plan, specifically revolving around separating your buyers from browsers. Once you have your visitors segmented, you can market to each type differently. For example, if through your analytics reports you find that most of your sales occur 5 – 7 days after the initial visit, try collecting email addresses on your website and sending out an email 3 days after the user’s visit. If they get to day 10 and still haven’t returned, try marketing a bit more aggressively.
Akin Arikan, a Senior Internet Marketing Manager from the Unica Corporation gave his presentation through a hypothetical situation at an ecommerce site. The story was meant to stress one main point – without any segmentation, your data is useless. The example from his presentation centered on a dropping conversion rate. However, through segmenting data, we are able to see that conversion rate had decreased due to a massive influx of traffic from an email marketing campaign. Even while site-wide conversion rate was down, the PPC conversion rate was actually increasing. Without properly segmenting the data, this company may have rashly decided to cut their PPC spend, which would have been disastrous for the bottom line.
Finally, an Omniture SEM Consultant named Jason Bishop took to the podium. His time was focused around a small handful of tips, the most interesting of which included using geo-segmented data to develop your PPC campaign budgets. Jason suggested using your website analytics to identify where your visitors are coming from, and then building geo-targeted campaigns catering to those areas with the high traffic areas receiving high budgets. Jason also strongly encourages the use of analytics to examine the conversion path of visitors. When you are able to pinpoint the actions that take place between the click and the conversion, you can truly begin to optimize.
Overall, the panelists provided some simple, but extremely valuable tips that we can sometimes overlook. The standout tip that nearly everyone mentioned was to ensure you properly segment your data. By segmenting, you can make much more educated decisions about every aspect of your website or landing pages. Proper segmentation will also prevent you from making ill-informed decisions that could negatively impact your site performance.
Tomorrow is set to be pretty busy, so expect to see more session recaps throughout the day.
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