Search Engine Marketing

Save the best for last! Insights for Search is one of the most awesome research tools you’ll use. I promise.

We have learned how to use Trends for Websites to measure core site metrics and identify strengths and weakness of our competitors.

One of the more interesting concepts presented at last week’s SES show in San Jose detailed the use of predictive revenue modeling for SEO and paid search. A former colleague of mine, Dave Roth of Yahoo!, runs search programs on behalf of Yahoo!’s properties. He discussed their use of predictive data models to gauge how they were performing against their competition.

In SEO it works like this:

As I left yesterday’s SES session, “Measuring Success in a 2.0 World,” it seemed to me that the speakers were sending a wake-up call to marketers, encouraging them — now that Web 2.0 is changing how content travels on the Internet — to ask the right questions when it comes to measuring campaigns. Content reaches consumers in new and unique ways — it is vital that marketers use the right tools to track the results of what is taking place online.

“Oh I’ve heard of Omniture. You guys do Web analytics, right?” Some would add, “I thought you loved Search. Why the change?”
I heard some variation of this every time I told people I was leaving the ad agency life for Omniture. The truth is Omniture’s SearchCenter product has one of the most compelling approaches to search engine marketing on the market and I’m excited to be a part of it. Over time, this blog will highlight some of the more interesting approaches to search engine marketing and how Omniture is helping to advance and enable those approaches.

Google’s Ad Planner is less a competitive intelligence tool and more a tool that gives fantastic insights into understanding behavior of visitors to your website in context of the broader ecosystem.

It also helps answer critical questions that have thus far stymied Online Marketers of all shapes and sizes (especially those in charge of acquisition).

If you are on the web, or do Web Analysis, it is a real crime if you don’t tap into the reams and reams of competitive intelligence data that is available online. It is a core component of a successful Web Analytics 2.0 strategy.

If you are using a modern web analytics tool (tag based or log based) it is quite likely that it is using cookies for tracking purposes.

In my conversations it is embarrassingly common to find a lot of FUD and confusion and lack of understanding (or appreciation of!) cookies and the role that they play in any analytics done on the web.

It’s a sad reality that many well-known organizations, including many Fortune 500 companies, still don’t understand the value of organic search.  Even some businesses with multi-million dollar paid search budgets have focused little effort in optimizing their sites for organic search.  The fact is these organizations are failing to capitalize on a major acquisition channel, and while they have yet to adopt search engine optimization (SEO) as a legitimate and standard marketing practice, their competitors are reaping the benefits.

What would make you cry of happiness in a Web Analytics report?

What would make you cry of happiness in any report / presentation that you got from a analytics practitioner or consultant or your mom?

This post attempts to sort through the good, the bad and the ugly and answer that question (except that Mom bit, that will require therapy!).

Tags, tracking advanced javascript functions, navigation summaries and exit pages, delights of benchmarking, challenges with goals and funnels, monogamy or polygamy, flash tracking and ajax, multi domain tracking, entrance paths (my favorite!), bosses and robots (is there a difference?), we tackle all these topics & more in this post.

But before all that, some context.