Advanced Analytics for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As I mentioned in my Omniture Summit 2009 recap, I was fortunate enough to be a co-presenter for a breakout session – ‘Makin’ Gold Records: Turning your SEO team into Rock stars.’ One of the most difficult things to do is track SEO and to determine how successful the SEO efforts have been. I am not going to talk about tips about how to optimize your site for search engines. There are already quite a few blogs and forums that talk about how to do this. What I am going to talk about are reports and analysis that can be set up to help determine how successful the SEO efforts have been. I am going to borrow from one of the slides in the presentation that really helps with this point, ‘43% of marketers don’t or can’t accurately measure ROI from SEO. To be successful with SEO, you must accurately measure success to drive value and action. In the end, it is not about driving traffic to the site, it is about making money.’ The question now becomes where to begin? To borrow another quote from the presentation, ‘With so much data available…the most important metric is that which helps improve your site.’

Sizing It Up: Measuring and Optimizing Rich Internet Applications

When I started thinking about what I was going to write for my next blog post, I had a couple of topics in mind trying to keep with my original plan for my blog of sharing my experiences in web analytics. Then the news broke that Adobe has agreed to purchase Omniture. Whether this acquasition is going to be good or bad, only time will tell. There has already been enough written on this topic, so I am going to focus this post on another topic. When the news broke of the acquisition, an idea for a post came to me. About a year ago or so, I co-presented a webinar with Omniture for an Adobe online seminar. Little did I know what would transpire a year later. As you can see from the title of the post, the webinar was about measuring and optimizing Rich Internet Applications. I have been very lucky in the last couple of years to have the opportunity to measure and optimize RIA’s and to work for the company that worked with Omniture to develop their flash tracking (ActionSource). Though I am not a developer and have never actually added the ActionSource tracking I work very closely with our flash developers to make sure the tracking that I would like is added to the RIA’s. Though I have tracked many different applications, most of the RIA’s that I going to cover in this post involve flash video, but I think this will give you a good idea of some of the tracking capabilities.

Tracking Marketing Campaigns

Have you ever experienced someone in the marketing department (SEM, Email, Corporate, etc) asking you how well the marketing campaign they just ran has preformed, only to realize that the campaign was not being tracked? This can be a very frustrating situation to not be able to let the marketing department know how well the campaign performed. The campaigns can be a newsletter, paid search, banner ads, twitter, facebook, widgets, or tiny URLs. The marketing department can run a marketing campaign on any combination of these. If the marketing department is not aware that the campaign needs to be tracked, then it is hard to let them how well their campaign performed. One of the things that I do is set up a weekly meeting with the marketing department to walk through their campaigns to make sure everything gets tagged. A bi-weekly meeting might be enough, depending on your company. I also created a document for the marketing department on how to add the tracking tags to each type of campaign. I am going to go cover add tracking tags for Google Analytics, Omniture, and Coremetrics.

Video Streams vs. Page Views

As I mentioned in my last post, Video Tracking, video is starting to become one of the more popular ways that sites are communicating and/or sharing information with their users. With the increased focus on videos, that begs the question, are the video plays hurting page views? This is a very interesting question. I am going to share some of the experiences that I have had of the last couple of years with the sites that I have worked since we have had more of a focus on video plays. The media sites that I work on also have tv channels that go along with the sites. Whenever possible, we publish full-episode videos to get users to come to the site to watch the episode that they missed on tv. Though there is also content about the show on the site, our theory that we had was that was that the video plays were hurting page views. Did this theory hold true?

Video Tracking

Video is starting to quickly become one of the most popular ways that sites are communicating and/or sharing information with its users. Sites like Hulu, Sling, and YouTube are growing in popularity. Portal sites, like AOL have a section that is completely dedicated to video. Media sites are putting more video on the sites than ever before, from video clips to full episodes. With this increased interest in video, it is important for accurate video tracking and to track the data that will help you understand how users are viewing the video. In this post, I am going to cover different tracking methodologies, video success metrics, the different pieces of information that you might want to capture about the video and video KPI’s.

Determining Success for a Media Site

In the years that I have spent in web analytics, one of the main questions that I have been asked is how do I determine success for the sites that I have worked on. That is a very good question and obviously determining success will very from site to site. The first few years that I spent in web analytics was spent on e-commerce sites. Determining success for an e-commerce site is fairly straight forward. For an e-commerce site you are going to look at revenue to determine success. Though you can also look at number of items purchased, Average Order Value (AOV), or Average Order per Visit, which all of these metrics are ultimately based on revenue. Though I have not worked on an airline site or a hotel site, determine success for either one of these sites is also fairly straight forward. For an airline site or a hotel site you are going to look at revenue as well, though you can also look at number of bookings or the look-to-book ratio to determine success. Another way to determine success for an airline or hotel site is the number of sign-up for the frequent purchaser program. I have spent the last couple of years working on media sites and determining success for media sites is not quite as obvious or straight-forward. So that leads to the question, how do you determine success for a media site? Well, the answer to that question is it depends on the site. I have been fortunate enough to work on several different media sites the last couple of years in a couple of different categories and determine success for each of the sites were slightly different, even for two sites in the same category.

Omniture Summit 2009

Now that it has been a couple of weeks since the summit has ended, I wanted to give me thoughts and opinions about the summit this year. On the last day of the summit, during the ski party someone asked me how many summits that I had been to. When I told him that this is my third summit, he asked why I keep coming back to the summit. What do I get out of the summit any more? Those are very good questions. My reasons for going to the summit this year have obviously changed from the first summit that I went to three years ago. Here are some of the reasons why I went to the summit this year:
o See what new products that Omniture is going to be releasing
o Networking – meet other companies that are tackling the same problems we are
o Get to talk to the Product Managers in person
o Customer Advisory Board meeting
o See what other companies are doing with the Omniture products
o Skiing, of course
OK, skiing is the not really one of the primary reasons why I went the summit this year, but it always nice to blow off some steam after a long week of meetings and sessions. When I went to the summit, I a few things that I wanted to get accomplished. We were having some issues with SiteCatalyst and I wanted to talk to the Product Manager in person to help get my questions answered and bring to their attention how serious this one is we are having. I always like the network component, you can never enough contacts. I have always enjoyed the keynote presentations and this year was no exception. Typically, have been hit and miss. Though this year I thought the breakout sessions have the best in the three years that I been to the summit (and I am not saying that because I was a co-presenter). I listen to a couple of the presentations that I was not able to make and I thought they were both great. Though I did not listen to all of them, I did download a few more of the presentations in pdf and really enjoyed that information that I got from the slides, though I did not get the full benefit of the full presentation.

Implementing Omniture Part II

When I wrote my first post on Implementing Omniture, I wanted to give a general overview of some of the techniques that I use to implement Omniture to help inform business decisions. I have had a better than expected response to the post. I want to follow up with more techniques, but I am going to cover a few more items. I am going to go over the differences between an eVar, a prop, and an event and how I choose which one I use. I am also going to cover the Omniture plug-ins that I use and why I use them. I was looking at some of my RSS reader and I saw a post by Adam Greco of Omniture that goes over some of the plug-in that Omniture offers. I know there are some people who are searching to find the Omniture Implementation manual for SiteCatalyst. As far as I am aware, the only way to get the Omniture Implementation Manual is having a login for SiteCatalyst. You will need to go to Knowledge Base section under Help and do a search for “full implementation manual.” That should get you the result where you can download the Implementation Manual. To understand if you should use a prop, an eVar, or an event, you need to know how each one of these items is used. Understanding these items, will ultimately help fill out the Omniture Tagging Strategy document.

Social Media

There has been a lot of talk about social media, companies talking about using Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. I am going to talk about how my current company uses social media, though I am going to take some liberties with what most people might think of as social media, but I am also going to give some examples of tradition social media. Another way of looking at Social Media according to Wikipedia is User Generated Content (UGC). One of the biggest examples of user generated content for us is our Rate My Space section on our site. Within this section of the site, users can upload pictures of their spaces into 21 different categories. Visitors to the site can comment on the photos and also it them. Photos are uploaded by our visitors every few minutes. Since there are always new photos being uploaded, our visitors come back frequently to check out the new photos to get decorating and/or re-modeling ideas for their spaces. The people who typically uploads photos of their spaces, uploads more than one photo to give multiple views of the room. Visitors will also upload photos of their spaces if they do not like a particular space and would like some help with ideas on how to re-decorate their space. We have also extended this type of UGC content beyond the Rate My Space section of our site. Four our Dream Home sweepstakes, we have My Dream Designs where visitors can upload photos of what is inspirational to them for their dream design or how the HGTV Dream Home has inspired them in their designs for their spaces.

De-bugging Web Analytics Tags

Now that the tagging plan has been completed, the code has been written, and the tags in place one of the tasks that is usually asked is for web analyst to be-bug the tags to make sure the tags are what you expected when you created the tagging plan. This is a task I am asked to do on a continuous basis. I de-bug tags, not just when a site is first tagged, but on an ongoing basis. There are several de-bugging tools that you can use; Fiddler Tool, Web Analytics Solutions Profiler (WASP), Charles Debugger, and Firebug. The tool that I use the most often is the Charles Debugger, followed by the Web Analytics Solutions Profiler. One of the things that I like about the Charles Debugger is I can view all of the pages that I have viewed or actions that I have taken on a site, though I use the Web Analytics Solution Profiler for a quick check of the tags on a page. When I de-bug new tags, I open the Tagging Strategy Worksheet that I created and then I open up the Charles Debugger. I look at the different pages and take the different actions to test each scenario in the tagging strategy worksheet. This gives me an opportunity to see if the tags being thrown match what I had envisioned for the tag. If the tags being thrown matches my vision in the tagging strategy worksheet, I then put an “x” in the Working column to let me know that I tested that information, so when I come back to review the worksheet to do additional testing I know which tags are working.