Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conferences are the largest global conferences focusing around Search and Social Marketing, touching on topics ranging from SEO to Video Optimization to PPC Management. The conference, since its start in 1999, has been held in major cities across the world and brings together professionals from a variety of different industries. The extensive, three-day event encompasses over 70 sessions, within tracks such as SEO, Paid Search and Social Media, along with interactive workshops led by Marketers and SEO professionals from major companies.

SES recently hosted one of their conferences here in Chicago. Rise Interactive’s CEO and Founder, Jon Morris, was featured on Day 1 during the SEO track. Morris participated on a panel focusing on Metrics for SEO. He later went into more detail on the topic with his presentation entitled “SEO: How Understanding Your Analytics Gives You the Edge,” which emphasized the importance of Web Analytics when looking to generate the highest return for your interactive investment. Following the event, Morris participated in an interview hosted by WebmasterRadio.FM where he further discussed the concept and practice of Interactive Investment Management.

SES Chicago presentation: http://www.riseinteractive.com/webinars/understanding-seo-analytics/get-the-analytics-edge.pdf

SES Chicago interview: http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/search-engine-strategies-conference/2011/interactive-investment-management

Chapter 1: Introduction to Google Analytics

Chapter 2: Finding Your Way Around Google Analytics

Chapter 3: Installing Google Analytics Tracking Code

Chapter 4: Interpreting Google Analytics Data

Chapter 5: Visits, Visitors and Pageviews

Continue checking back to our Resources page as new chapters are being posted frequently.

Morris will take you on a deep dive into understanding the key data points that will help you move the needle with your SEO investment. This session will go beyond the basics of search engine optimization and will give actionable items around Prioritization, Content Development and the Analytical data points you should be monitoring.

Attendees will also learn about the growing practice of Interactive Investment Management and how to manage their online spend in a manner that will produce higher ROI. Morris will use real world examples drawn from his experience working with some of the world’s largest and best known brands on how to create your own SEO roadmap.

The Roadmap looks at 6 key factors in determining the appropriate way to prioritize your SEO efforts.

These factors include:

Analysis of a keywords by category

Current coverage in the category against all others

An understanding of content needs

Probability for ranking success

The relevance of the keywords to your business

Your estimated ROI

Register for SEO: How Understanding Your Analytics Gives You the Edge here.

To access real-time reporting, a user must enable the new version of Google Analytics (GA5).  For anyone who doubts the necessity of making the switch, we made a compelling argument in August that is underscored with the roll-out of ‘real-time’.  The new reports originally were housed in the Dashboards tab, but they will be moved to the Home tab in the imminent update of the GA5 interface.  Four reports are available in the Real-Time beta:

Overview

Locations

Traffic Sources

Content

The Overview tab provides a high level view of the most salient metrics and data about your site.  Visitors are segmented between returning and new using the utma visitor cookie.  Top Referral, Top Keywords and Top Active Pages are displayed in separate tables.  A heat map shows the geography of the Top Locations of traffic origination (or more correctly, the server hosting the visitor’s IP).  Additionally a time graph of pageviews is offered using (t-minutes) data which keys off of the utmb session cookie.

On the Locations tab, the time lapse page view graph persists accompanied by a flat world map or 3-D view enabled by adding the Google Earth Plugin.  Active visitors are now segmented by country.

The Traffic Sources report segments the visitors according to Medium and adds a table including source and the number of active visitors.

Lastly, the Content report is similar to the Traffic Sources report with the exception that the source/medium/active visitors table is substituted for a table with Active page and Active Visitors.  The Active Visitors metric can be toggled to display number of views by page.

I am suitably impressed by the smooth feel and efficiency of the Real Time Google Analytics reporting.  I feel obligated to caution readers that the interface can become a quick time-sink as you monitor active updates and changes to visitors on your site.  From a business value stand-point, some additional time is required to come up with application of the real-time metrics.  Perhaps blast email campaigns efficacy can be analyzed spontaneously?  Maybe testing environments could be made much more dynamic if configured adequately to display in the Content reports.  These are just a couple preliminary musings.  I welcome additional insights and feedback.

Spyfu:

If the name doesn’t give it away, this is a great tool for competitive analysis. Spyfu allows you to check keywords that you currently rank for along with your competitors’ keyword rankings and provides a comparison. The unique piece that Spyfu offers is that you can look into what your competitors’ top organic words are, as well as get an idea for what they are doing in paid campaigns.

SEO Tip: Use this tool to come up with blog topics! Spy on your competition to learn what words they are ranking for. Then, run the same report on your own site to cross-check and find words that you don’t have anything ranking. Once you have a set of words that your site doesn’t rank for, get writing!

SEOMoz:

SEOMoz has TONS of resources for search engine optimization (it is hard to even know where to start). If I were a business working on my own SEO and could only have one tool- this would be it. Overall, SEOMoz has a wide-variety of tools to help be proactive in your SEO efforts, as well as to address any problems you are having in your optimization efforts. My favorite offering of SEOMoz is the campaigns. You can set up a “campaign” for websites that you need to monitor regularly. Using this campaign, SEOMoz sends a crawler (RogerBot) to crawl your site on a weekly basis. RogerBot reports back on any items that could raise a flag with search engines. You can even download these reports whenever you want.  Another valuable (but not very unique) tool that SEOMoz offers is the keyword tracking ability. You can upload a list of keywords that you want to track positions on and it will check positions on a weekly basis and keep historical positions.

I am very much looking forward to their social media tracking (currently in Beta). That is another really nice part about SEOMoz- it is always improving tools and capabilities.

SEO Tip: Link your Google Analytics account to view organic traffic, number of URL’s receiving organic traffic and the number of keywords sending organic traffic on a weekly basis. (We know you could just login to your Google Analytics account, but it is sure nice to see this all in one place!)

Yahoo Site Explorer:

Yahoo Site Explorer is nothing fancy or new- no bells and whistles. However, it is still my go-to for checking back links to a site. While you can only export 1,000 back links, it still gives you a good idea of the number of back links that a site has.

SEO Tip: Use Yahoo Site Explorer in conjunction with SEOMoz’s Linkscape Visualization Tool. This will give you a good idea of whether your site is falling short on authority of links or link count.

Screaming Frog:

Screaming Frog is a really fast site crawler. It crawls a website and returns all URLs, page titles, response codes, headers, meta keywords, meta descriptions, canonical tags and much much more! This site crawler is the most comprehensive crawler that I have found to date. In addition to being the most comprehensive, it is lightening fast!

SEO Tip: Use Screaming Frog to find 302 (temporary) redirects. Use Yahoo (above) to explore these URL’s to see if they have links. If so, switch these to 301 redirects so that link juice can be passed through to the new URL.

The new metric will be unique to Facebook Insights, the analytics dashboard offered by the social media platform, but – unlike many other Facebook Insights metrics – will be publicly displayed.  Many other metrics, both within and outside of Facebook, make only the number of friends and followers easily accessible to users, displaying the other, more meaningful metrics to page owners.

So what is this new metric, what goes into it and what does it mean to you?

People Talking About is planned to be one singular rating intended to tell users how compelling and interesting a page’s content is.  As with so many other social media metrics, this is calculated based not on the page’s content, but how users interact with it and how often.  Likes, shares, comments, wall posts, mentions and check-ins all factor into this calculation.  The idea behind this metric – which will be displayed prominently beneath the number of likes a page has – is, of course, that if others like and interact with a page, it’s probably pretty interesting and we would all likely want to check it out as well.

What it means for users:

Facebook wants more than ever for us to have a unique, targeted and effective user experience.  While the unveiling of Facebook’s new layout had many feeling betrayed by the social media site, these new developments are actually in the best interest of the user.  We will now be more likely to find content that we find interesting or entertaining and can avoid pages that push out content blindly without a mind to consumers and what they really want.  It means that users have a more official say in what pages live to go viral and which are to be banished to Facebook exile, never to be shared again.

What it means for companies:

While these new changes are all well and good for the user, they and this new very visible metric, could prove trickier for companies, challenging brands and company pages to produce genuinely interesting, useful, engaging content.  This may have seemed a fairly obvious requirement for effective social media campaigns, but it has already left many page owners scratching their heads as to just how to be engaging (for some ideas, check out 8 Ideas for Generating Engaging Content for the New Facebook).  Now, more than ever, brands and companies must offer something for people to talk about.

This may be the justification that some companies need to finally hire a social media manager.  At the very least, a very good reason to not let your intern head up your social media strategy.  It’s not enough to have a presence and get people to like your page.  Thought must go into who your consumer is, what they expect from their interaction with your page in social media, and how to deliver on that expectation.

However, just like with many other metrics, it is not the be-all, end-all of social media metrics.  It should factor into your social media monitoring and reporting, but only as part of a much larger examination.  This number should help guide your strategy, to tell you if something you’re doing is working and what may be wasted energy.  It also makes it easier for companies to scope out other brands that may be doing a good job, whose pages can then be audited to possibly identify some successful strategies that could be applied to a different brand page.

Yeah, what else?

People Talking About is just one of four new metrics being shined up and added to Facebook Insights.  ‘Likes’ remain ever meaningful and, with the roll-out of Facebook’s new verb buttons (Read, Watched, Listened), will become more indicative of a users’ general affinity for a post’s content.  Brand new to the line-up are “Friends of Fans” which, as you might have guessed, tells a page owner how many friends its fans have, and “Weekly Total Reach,” which attempts to determine (accurately or at least semi-accurately), how many times your content has been referenced and distributed.  Finally, Pages Insights will also very kindly track a page’s last 500 posts and theoretically tell you how many engaged fans it has and its virality, which is to be determined using the number of comments a posts receives.

Is this really useful?

As I mentioned, it will be more important than ever for a brand or company page to be engaging and this number could help give some indication of just how effective a social media strategy is to that effect.  However, it would appear that this new metric may need some tweaking and not just in regards to the name.  ‘Weekly Total Reach’ and the number of engaged fans will likely be helpful to page owners, because it tracks fairly reliable metrics like shares and comments, but it’s unlikely that comments is enough to determine the virality of a post.  This could also serve to trip up some companies and lull them into a false sense of security, with numbers like Friends of Fans which is essentially meaningless if fans aren’t engaging with and sharing a page’s content.  It also does not track sentiment, for better or for worse, counting all comments the same whether positive or negative (See here for other considerations to using social media metrics).

The dive into historical data is unique and could prove useful in providing companies with a baseline reading of engagement to compare future results with.  My advice to companies is to take this new development with a grain of salt.  It is, after all, focused solely on Facebook activity and is at the end of the day, just one of many meaningful metrics to help you determine your social media effectiveness.  In order to have a truly effective social media campaign, remember the foundation of Facebook: its users.  Use the metrics as a guide but be human in your content strategy.  That’s what will really get people talking.

If you have worked in a B2B setting where your sales team has utilized a CRM system you have probably heard a million gripes from the frontline about entering data. “It offers me no value…It is just so management can spy on me… It takes too much time, I’d rather be selling…” the list goes on and on. The truth is it can be a pain for the bag carriers, but what if you, as a marketer, can offer something in return for data? Leads… more leads, better leads. Sounds good right, it gets better. If your team has a complex sale with a long cycle you can also offer the ability to help them close those deals faster.

How is this all possible? Data. Good data.

Part of this rests on the shoulders of the reps, but as marketers part of it also falls on our shoulders. None of this is possible if we don’t make ourselves part of the team that helps set up what fields live in a CRM system. Beyond that, it all becomes an exercise in futility if we do not analyze the data and make actionable recommendations to our future marketing strategies based on the data that lives here.  

Going beyond the CRM, what other tools are you utilizing to capture data, and how are these tools speaking to each other to tell the whole story of the lead life cycle?

If a lead comes in from the web, was it a banner, paid search or an organic listing that drove them to your site? Just listing something as a web lead can be misleading and will not tell you the entire story of how your e-marketing efforts are making an impact. Now, in the age of social media where everyone is jumping in, do you know how to calculate social ROI? Do you even know what you are supposed to be measuring? Does acquiring a mass number of followers or likes equate to anything? Do these followers actually take action or work as influencers and champions of your brand? If they are, and they are driving qualified traffic to your site which leads to web conversions, how are you capturing the fact that they originally learned of you via social?

It is not only web leads, or even the front of the cycle where you need to have a focus on your data capture and measurement efforts. How familiar are you with your sales team’s process – are you familiar with what happens in each stage of the sales cycle? If not, you should be, because this is the point where marketing automation and sales enablement collide and where marketing can be a hero. It can also be the point where marketing can be welcomed into the process as opposed to having a sales team that outright rejects anyone communicating with their opportunities. If you understand the sales cycle and effectively can analyze the stages of the deal you can look for trends where deals are hanging and can focus content efforts here that can help educate the buyer to drive the deal forward.

Now that you are doing that, how are you tracking this new marketing impact on new logos being acquired? Are you also tracking the impact of cold leads that were revived by marketing efforts and became opportunity ready?

The job of marketing has changed forever and no one doubts it will change again, but no matter what marketing looks like in the coming decades you can be sure to bet that data will be at its core. It is the smart marketers that are making this their focus today and positioning themselves, and their companies, for future success in what comes next. Smart marketers are the ones that know it is not just collecting a bunch of numbers, but the ones that matter and then begin a plan of action. Like the title of this blog suggests, it not a numbers game… it is the future success of your organization.

Magma Mobile: Droid Analytics  1.1.8  (Paid App ($2.39)/24 hour free trial available)

Upon logging into the App, users are taken to a scrollable menu displaying all of the associated accounts by profile.  Each entry contains the profile name in bold face, the account name, and the ga ID (not to be confused with the UA ID).  If an account contains one web property or unique profile names within each web property, the interface is functional.  However, if an account has multiple web properties with similar or identical profiles within each property (e.g. a profile named “Blog” in both “Sales” and “Service” web properties of an account), there is no way to differentiate between the two profiles.  For power users of Google Analytics, the inability to distinguish among profiles by web property can be confusing.  One work-around would be to modify the profile name to indicate with which property it is associated.  Alternatively, including the property name in the App would be a wonderful improvement to Droid Analytics.  Perhaps the gaID could be substituted for the property name without adding clutter to the display.  For those who manage several accounts with numerous profiles (as you can imagine is the case at Rise Interactive), the list is overwhelming and difficult to navigate.  I would prefer a more hierarchical interface from which I could select the account I want to view, then choose among properties and finally select a profile.  For users who manage few accounts or a limited number of profiles, this may not be an issue and the interface is perfectly adequate.

After a profile has been selected, the App defaults a table containing pageviews, visits, visitors, time and pages per visit, and bounce rate.  Regardless of the orientation of your device, the display is set to landscape which is good forethought on the part of Magma Mobile.  Buttons on the bottom of the display toggle between daily, weekly, monthly and custom range time frames.  The defaults for each of these time periods are 30 days, 52 weeks and ‘Since 2005’, respectively, but the terms can be changed in the settings menu.  The data in the display can be graphed by selecting the ‘chart’ button.  I like this functionality for its ease of use and ability to render graphically trends and anomalies that may not be readily discernible in a tabular format.

A variety of ‘Top’ criteria can be accessed as well.  Available fields include keywords, source (utm_medium), search engine, referring site and goal conversions among others.  The default for the number of entries displayed is 100 and the date range defaults to month to date.  Both of the settings can be customized.

Overall, Droid Analytics achieves a great deal of what you want to see in a Google Analytics App.  It is functional, easy to use and contains most of the high level summary data that would be relevant to a user on a mobile device.  Even the color scheme is very similar to Google Analytics.  While power users may find limitations to the layout and profile selection, those who have a craving to see Google Analytics data in the palm of their hand will find Droid Analytics more than suitable.  For the $2.39 purchase price, I found it to be a good value.

MUGITEK:  mAnalytics 1.4  (Free App; Paid ‘Pro’ version available $1.13)

The start-up for mAnaltyics is slower and contains a couple more steps than Droid Analytics.  Once you have logged in and accessed your account, all available profiles are displayed.  However, the account name is not displayed with the profile.  For a user like me, the omission of at least the account name (not to mention web property) makes mAnalytics impracticable.  Without an account name attached to the profile, I cannot differentiate among all of the profiles managed by Rise Interactive that employ similar naming conventions.

Once you have selected a profile, the App prompts you to choose from several pre-configured or custom date ranges.  A table will generate with the following metrics:  Visits, Pageviews, Unique visitors,  Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits.  Four additional reports are available, including segments such as ‘Visits by country’.  Graphing elements are limited to Visits and Pageviews.  The graph is displayed as a white line on a black background with grey axes and scale, which I found somewhat difficult to see.   Overall, the interface is clean and orderly, if unremarkable.  Users who are interested in a very basic App with limited functionality (which, in fairness, is endemic to all Google Analytics Apps) may find utility in mAnaltyics.

These are just two of the Apps available for Google Analytics on the Android operating system.  While I have explored some of the others to varying degrees, I consider these two the best among the paid and free Apps.  As always, I am interested in other points of view and opinions…

Since writing this blog, I have discovered Mobile GA from Actual Metrics.  For a free App, Mobile GA is tough to beat.  The App addresses the most glaring shortcoming for a user like me who has numerous accounts, web properties and similarly named profiles.  The initial screen displays each account with an expandable menu listing the associated profile(s).  Mobile GA also includes the UA number which provides a way to differentiate among similarly named profiles!  While not as robust as some of the paid Apps in terms of available metrics and customization, Mobile GA is superior to any of the other free Apps I have tested.   Portrait orientation displays data in tabular format.  Switching to landscape orientation, the same data is displayed in graphical format.  I found this to be really neat functionality.  Sorry mAnalytics….you have been replaced by Mobile GA on my Android.

1. Events as Goals

Event tracking has previously been reported and totaled in a section of Google Analytics outside of the Goals.  Events provide the ability to detail interactions into category, action, label and value.  Event tracking is an important component of the user engagement as it reports on all of the non-page view interaction like downloads, button clicks, third party site links, etc.  Until now, these types of activities were not able to be tracked in the “Goals” section of Google Analytics.

2. Multi-Channel Funnels

An entirely new feature of Google Analytics 5 (which was just released across all accounts on August 25^th) is the addition of multi-channel funnels.  Moving away from solely last click attribution, Google Analytics 5 offers the ability for users to gain insight into the full conversion path for a visitor over the past 30 days.  To take advantage of the multi-channel funnels, simply enable goals or e-commerce tracking.  The reports can be found within the “My Conversions” tab of the user interface.

3. Admin Section

The Admin section has received a cosmetic make-over that, in our opinion, makes it much easier and intuitive to navigate.  Chief among these improvements is the ability to transition from an account, to a web property and ultimately, to a profile.  Upon clicking on the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the interface, you are taken to a new screen containing a menu bar for Profiles, Tracking Code and Web Property Settings in one clean and easy to navigate location.  Within the “Profiles” tab, Assets, Goals, Users, Filters and Settings are all displayed in a horizontal menu bar allowing for quick access as opposed to the somewhat disparate locations in the older version.

4. Updated Home Section

The “Account Home” section has been modified to display each account you have access to as a user, as opposed to the default listing of ten in the older version.  Also, for those users who use multiple web properties and profiles, Google Analytics 5 enables you to see all of these within any account through expandable menus, rather than navigating to a second screen in the old version.  We have found this to be an enormous time-saver when switching among accounts, properties and profiles.  A drop-down menu in the upper right section of the interface offers an additional method of selecting an account.

5. Widgets

The dashboard in Google Analytics 5 offers four different widget classes:  Table, Metric, Pie Chart, and Timeline.  Widgets can be dragged and dropped into the layout, allowing for quick and easy customization.

Overall, we are very pleased with the improvements in Google Analytics 5.  We encourage you to explore the new functionality and interface.  Before long, you will likely choose to make this your default version for Google Analytics.

Who

Knowing who is coming to your site is one of the most important things Analytics can show you. GA made this quite clear with the side bar labeled Visitors. In this side bar, you find out where your visitors live, what web browser they use and whether or not people come to your site on their phones or tablets. One of the coolest features in this section is the Location Report, which is a map that shows where all of your traffic is coming from. It defaults to a map of the world and you can narrow your searches down to the town or city.

Where

I know that I am not following the normal flow of the W’s (‘Who’, followed by ‘What’, followed by ‘Where’…), but in my mind this order seems more logical when explaining Analytics. ‘Where’ stands for where your visitors are coming from and how they are getting to your site. There are 4 main ways someone can get onto your website: 1) typing in the URL (direct), 2) clicking on a link from another site (referral), 3) clicking on paid search advertisements on a search engine (Paid), or 4) clicking on an organic listing on a search engine (Organic/Natural). Knowing where your visitors are coming from is very important as a measurement. In this side bar, you can find out how well your paid search efforts are working at bringing people to your site or even determining if changes your site have improved your visitors’ experience. This information is found under the Traffic Sources tab on the side bar.

What

‘What’ is the final component to understanding Google Analytics. What are your visitors doing on your site?: Signing up for newsletters? Watching videos? Reading articles or blogs? All of these can be tracked within Google Analytics. This is where I spend most of my time within Analytics because it is important to know what your visitors are doing on your site, starting with finding out what pages they are visiting the most and where they are going to next. This can be found in the Content tab in the side bar under the Site Content group. Tracking events can be extremely helpful when you want to see how visitors are interacting with your site; this is how you can see if they are watching videos and clicking on specific objects. There are extra pieces of code that need to be installed for event tracking to properly work, but it is definitely worth the effort. The great thing about event tracking is that you can now set an event—such as someone clicking on a video—as a goal and easily report it as a goal conversion. Every analytics account should use goals; they are the easiest way to keep track and measure key interactions on your site. With events, you define the goal based on the naming of the event within the code—such as the category or action. The more common type of goal is a URL destination, which is triggered when a specific page on your site is visited—such as a thank you or confirmation page. Discovering the ‘What’ component in Google Analytics is my personal favorite because it is a constant learning experience. There are always ways to improve tracking within Analytics and if you don’t believe me—Google it.