Search Strategy Expo Part 2: Analytics and Conversion By Frank Fortunato
May 2, 2007
Today we wrap up our coverage of the Search Engine Strategy Conference held recently in New York City, with an overview of analytics and conversion tactics.
The moderator of the Web Analytics: Measuring Success session, Allen Dick, of Vintage Tub and Bath, thought he had been crowned the King of France. His antique tub and bath company had jumped its ranking in France from 10,000 to the top 10. Then, recalling that Google had just bought YouTube, he did some research and discovered the French were typing in "You Tub."
"It was hard to believe that half of France wanted us to ship 400-pound bathtubs across the Atlantic," he told the audience. This icebreaker proved that the business of measuring search engine success with software-driven analytics may not be rocket science, but it certainly is complex — and a necessity for most SEM campaigns.
Next, Laura Thieme, president of BizResearch, began her presentation with questions. She asked the packed room how many believed search leads to a profit, and got only a scattered display of hands for a response. The questions continued: Can you determine if search is delivering leads, sales at a profit or loss? Can sales be traced to a campaign, ad-group, keyword level, to organic versus paid ads, to the product or service? What does your matrix look like? What are you basic KPIs (key performance indicators), average cost-per-click, position, ad cost by campaign, keyword, ad group, return-on-investment versus return-on-advertising-spending, average cost per order, cost per acquisition? And finally, do you know your true customer acquisition cost, and gross versus net profit? With the audience in an attentive, if cowed, silence the presentation began. Here are the highlights.
Tracking: Organic versus Paid
Tracking strings must be updated and accurate. If they are not, Web analytic data will not be accurate. Your Web analytics vendor should monitor tracking strings to insure their accuracy.
ROAS (return on advertising spending) analysis provides more information than visibility and traffic reports. ROAS tracking offers added value over ROI (return on investment).
What is an acceptable customer acquisition cost? Gathering a large quantity of customers quickly does not necessarily equate to acceptable profit margins per customer. It's important to find the right software to determine this.
Tracking should incorporate visibility, spider activity, traffic, sales, latency, KPIs and ROAS. A recommended tool is WebPositionGold version 3.5 , which incorporates WorkTracker and WordTrends and can track for organic and paid shopping searches.
A crackerjack search engine marketer may not be a good Web site analyst so keep your options open when considering who to hire.
In addition to showing which pages are ranked, ranking reports can be useful when you are redesigning your Web site, embedding keywords or otherwise changing your URLs in any way.
Tracking: Spider Activity Several software products are recommended for this task:
NetTracker Spider Report, which is included in the full version software, but not included in the hosted version.
Urchin Spider Report, also included only in the full version.
WebTrends Spider Report, included in both the hosted and non-hosted versions.
ClickTracks Pro, this program tracks frequency and is not hosted.
Google Analytics.
Ranking Issues and Advanced Analytics The time it takes for a search engine to visit your site, and then to rank it, varies depending on the engine. The second speaker, Stacy Williams of Prominent Placement Inc, who started a non-profit Web site, noted that though Google was the first to visit her site, it was the last to index it, with MSN being the first one to do so.
Williams says if your site is not getting ranked, you should ask yourself if the site is indexed, if it's getting spidered, if you have log files that can tell you which pages were hit and when and recommends reviewing and analyzing NetTracker spider data to address these issues.
Web Analytics Tools Of course, you need the right tools for the job, and a plan for deciding which ones best suits your needs. The recommended Web site analytical software services from the forum are Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Hitbox, NetTracker, Google Analytics and ClickTracks. Differentiating issues to consider before selecting a software product include:
Interface and ease of use.
Hosted versus log file analysis software.
The ability to track paid advertising campaigns AND organic performance.
Detailed robot analysis.
The ability to analyze aggregate traffic and user sessions for dynamic sites.
Customer latency methodology, meaning first-party cookies compared to third-party cookies, campaign tracking and customer support and training.
Adaptability to interface changes.
Data ownership and use.
And, oh yes, cost.
What Drives Traffic? NetTracker Keyword Referrals is highly recommended for making it extremely easy to figure out whether ads or organic listings are driving valuable traffic at the keyword level, without guess work.
ClickTracks with WebTrends Analysis and Overlay provides information as to what visitors are doing and why so you can make decisions based on the results. Funnel Reports are better. For instance, ClickTracks Pro Funnel Report indicated that a blog was the top traffic provider for a site, but that it was not persuasive in getting people to buy.
Trends (can be) Your Friends While conducting all of this sophisticated technical analysis, we are advised not to forget about local cultural factors and seasonal trends. Marketing in China during the two-week New Year's celebration in February will prove disappointing, as will going up against the World Cup in South America, and, need we mention Super Bowl Sunday?
On the other hand, for instance, The Atlanta Children's Shelter found that November and December brought in holiday donations, the first two weeks of January provided New Year's resolution volunteers and that a two-week window of charitable giving occurred at Easter. In short, there are things you can control, things you cannot; identify why something happened to prepare for the future.
Recommended Resources The sheer detail and complexity of Web analytics prevents it from being digested and usefully understood in a 90-minute presentation by most mere mortals — without outside help. Here are several print and online resources.
Books and Guides Eric Peterson: Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks Jim Sterne: Web Metrics Bryan Eisenberg and Jim Nova: Web Marketer's Common Sense Guide Marketing Sherpa: Search Marketing 2007 Benchmark Guide, Web Analytics 2006 Buyers GuideOrganizations and Forums Web Analytics Association Emetrics Yahoo Web Analytics GroupConverting Browsers into Buyers Next, we attended a presentation on nailing transactions. Not all presenters are created equal. Some have a gift for communicating complex information in an accessible style that holds the audience's attention from opening comments to the question period. Such is the case with the two veteran SES speakers from this session, Bryan Eisenberg CPO (Chief Persuasion Officer) at Future Now, Inc. and Michael Sack, Director, SEM technology, Idearc Media Corp. The session dealt with all aspects of optimizing Web sites for the elusive pot of gold: Conversion.
While lack of traffic gets e-tailers nowhere, the emphasis here is on all aspects of shepherding visitors through an attractive, easy-to-navigate site, from landing page to check out.
In this graphics-heavy presentation, we are first shown a pyramid plan for the hierarchy of site optimization, reading from the base to the tip: functionality, accessibility, ease-of-use, intuitiveness and persuasiveness.
We are told that the average conversion rate is about 2 percent. This can be improved in four steps:
Prepare Your Site
Begin by comparing your site to the industry's best sites. What makes them convert, how do they drive traffic to conversion? Emulate the best practices. Identify conversion points by measuring ALL conversions.
Control the experience. Milk is always in the back of the supermarket by design — scientifically tested to control the flow through the store. And so this should be done on web Sites with "hot" product placement accessible anywhere through multiple "virtual doorways" that may also lead past other products in a controlled flow.
Avoid information overkill on the home page. An example is given of a Kmart site with 100 links on the home page. Even 50 links are too many, leading to confused navigation and ultimately abandonment. (Eisenberg believes the visitors should be able to get to where they want to go in three clicks.) Elements of a good home page include good layout, clear purpose, limited options, self identification and good search functionality.
Target Your Traffic
Determine through market research how people search, make your site fit people's searches. You will not change how people search.
When it comes to keyword and phrase research, more is better, according to both speakers: 5,000 to 10,000 is fine. Stem your keywords, use match type options and comb your logs. The testable keywords and phrases should whittle down to about 50.
Use and micromanage your bidding time zone. It is important to know the ROI by day of week and time of day, and bid accordingly, lowering and raising bids based on conversion rates during the time spans.
Target landings uniquely: Know from where your visitor arrives. Which search engine, which product? Change your landing pages based on the search engine/source and intent of the visitor. For instance, if 60 percent of red sneaker buyers arrive from Google, steer them to the red sneaker page.
Test, analyze and adjust. An example is given of three landing pages tested for the Bose Wave radio. Two are packed with small images and text, a third is less cluttered with a large image of the product. The audience was asked to pick which page was most effective and it correctly picked the third, less cluttered page.
The conversion rates for the pages varied from 1.75 percent up to 3 percent, which on a $500 product translated to a significant increase in revenue. The audience also correctly identified the image of a pear cut open on a plate to be more effective than that of an uncut pear. Other examples showed revenue increases of exponential multiples, increases that might not be realized without testing several versions.
Track and Learn
There are several "Musts" for conversion tracking: Must be able to track by keyword at each search engine, to see click path from search to conversion, to track direct and deferred conversions, associate the cost-per-click to the transaction and the revenue it generates and calculate at least a "gross ROI."
Search stacks and assists for all the terms used prior to a conversion, their relative contribution and use click-path analysis for key words.
Fine-Tune the Cart
The drop out rate in carts is phenomenal; more than anywhere else on the site, the wheels come off a conversion at the cart page. Point-of-sales assurances are critical. Here are some elements of a good cart: Speed, four or less steps to checkout; requiring the least amount of information possible; privacy assurances; indications showing shoppers where they are in the process and accurate inventory and shipping availability that lets customers know when they will receive an item.
One important note of advice: There should be no hidden charges. Nothing galls a customer more than expecting to pay a $9.99 shipping charge and then getting hit with an additional $5.95 "processing and handling" fee at the last minute. While customers might pay if they want the item badly enough, the chances that they will return are next to nil. There should be no surprises of any kind at the cart.
Effective shopping carts should allow for items to be bought as both personal and corporate gifts, and accessible at any time in the process. Don't forget to capture e-mail addresses and make it easy for the visitor to come back.
Finally, don't forget finesse; tact goes a long way. "Contact Me" labeling a button sounds much better to most people than "Submit." Handle mistakes in a polite and pleasant manner: "Perhaps we didn't get you zip code correctly" verses "You entered an invalid zip code."Bottom Line: Search Engine Strategies Evolving The number of presentations at the SES Conference, more than 70 sessions presented over four days, bears witness to the complexities of search engine marketing. With an average of five sessions in each time slot, attendees were compelled to select sessions based on their skill levels and areas of interest.
In all, the conference was an impressive display of the sheer scope of the industry. And yet a survey conducted of participants during the first two days of the forum, polling 221 "Web-based ad experts" as to the level of development they feel SEM has achieved. Seventy-one percent said the industry is in only halfway there, 21 percent felt it is in a primitive state and just 3 percent believe it cannot get any better. Apparently, search engine marketing will continue to be a developing — and critical — component of successful online selling for some time to come.
Frank Fortunato is a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com.
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