Search Analytics : SMX Analytics Toronto 2009

March 22nd, 2009

by Laura Thieme
Presenting at Search Marketing Expo’s (SMX) Analytics Show Toronto 2009

I will be in Toronto to speak at the SMX Analytics Conference. This is the first Search Analytics show - kudos to Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman for daring to make a conference all about search analytics. I of course wonder how attendance will be affected by the economy, its location in Toronto and its themed analytics focus. There is also a Sydney Australia SMX show the next day after the Toronto conference ends.

But the economy is just the reason that search marketers should be investing in this particular search marketing conference. The bottom line, and proving that you are at least breaking even if not making money is crucial right now. You have to prove leads are occurring from your web marketing efforts, and if you can’t prove leads are resulting, you’re likely to see a change in vocational venue.

Bizresearch began developing a search analytics platform a year ago, Bizwatch. Our team of programmers created a web-based console where you could track and analyze organic (SEO), paid search (PPC/CPC), and web analytics data trends in one place. There is an extraordinary amount of data to sort through in tools that focus on a particular search marketing vertical arena. We counted the number of tools that our employees would need to use to do their job, MS Office included - there were at least 35 tools to manage approximately six search marketing accounts.

That number of tools is largely due in part to there being organic search marketing tools, paid search tools, bid management tools, website analytics tools, keyword research tools, competitor analyses tools, and yes, Dreamweaver or HTML editing tools. Don’t forget other tools that include rank position checkers for SEO positions in Google, Yahoo & MSN such as WebPositionGold, or keyword density tools, or link checker tools. Then you add on that the ability to use MS Excel to import/export data, set up master spreadsheets, or Powerpoint - oh - and of course there are two versions that people use today - MS Office XP and Vista - that creates another level of challenges. SO much learning curve required for employees new to search marketing, new to various accounts, and yes, new to website analytics regardless of whether they are agency-side, or freelancers, or in-house corporate marketers.

I often found as an employer, and recently, as an OSU Marketing 754 instructor, that the number of tools for search marketers and web analytics were frustrating to the point of discouraging tenure within the industry. Long-time search marketers were getting so frustrated that they had to learn data-centric tools, many of which they found to be counter-intuitive, that they often left as they felt their creative juices were stymied by the requirement to analyze so much data. In fact, reporting became the main focus of some search marketers. Thus, we decided to update our old patent-pending (withdrawn a month ago due to new Bilski patent ruling) system with a new platform, which is created in Java, Bizwatch(TM) with an all-in-one search analytics reporting system.

We use mostly API licenses for SEO, paid search (CPC), bid management, and web analytics and then create what we consider are the most important data analyses that marketers need to be focused on - and yes, while we have visitor trend data, that’s not the most important part of what you’ll see. Come to Search Analytics : SMX Analytics Toronto 2009 : and hear me speak on March 31, 2009 at 4:30 p.m.

Interested in Bizwatch(TM)?

Posted in SMX - Search Engine Land Conferences, Search Analytics. No Comments »

 

SMX East NYC - Reviving a Paid Search Program

October 7th, 2008

by Laura Thieme
October 7, 2008

Alissa Ruehl - - speaker - this was a basic session review of paid search tactics

When you onboard a new client, negative keywords are the first thing reviewed; finding irrelevant search terms (she said to look at Google Search Query Report, but we choose to review Google Analytics for the actual traffic referring term). She suggests running it by ad group, longer time frame. I like the concept of this report, but it doesn’t always report back on every single broad match term if there were not enough traffic referrals to justify a hit on the search query report.

Check out Nassim Nicholas Taleb from longnow.org
on YouTube

Illusion of Control - Andrew Goodman talked about how doctors have the ultimate trust, the ultimate all-knowing - when you’re in control of a paid search campaign. But not always do doctors have all the answers, or the right answers.

Irrelevant terms - cutting out the fat - getting rid of terms that are not sending the right kind of traffic - consider making these terms negative, or lowering the match type from “broad” to another match type such as “phrase” and [exact].

She suggested match types on negative keywords as well. As a last resort, pause or delete keywords. We don’t like to personally delete keywords, as we like to keep the data history to review later, especially when account managers change within a company as often as they do in the search world.

Dynamic keyword insertion you’ve probably seen in Google, but perhaps not used yet. {Keyword: Insertion} in the ad copy title usually works well, but is not always relevant.

Nothing novel or new here as of yet.

Recap: Reduce irrelevant impressions, reduce clicks, increase conversion rates

Joanna Lord, OneTime.com In-House SEM Strategist
OneTime.com is a travel meta search engine

Hardly does any SEO, most of the marketing comes from paid search efforts
15% repeat user base

First, isolate the problem and keep detailed team-based records using tools such as Twiki, Yammer and Basecamp - attach all specs in one place

Hold a meeting, become aware of each person’s challenges

Is there something that goes beyond the clicks, impressions, average position - is it seasonal, is there an industry movement, or change in the industry? Perhaps there is something beyond what you’re working on within the silo of Google Adwords.

If you check out VeryRecent.com, it tells you what is happening or what is being talked about with respect to that keyword/phrase.

What are your high volume campaigns doing? Is this a seasonality effect? Is this an economic crisis effect? Isolate/stabilize your best performers.

Andrew Goodman, author of Winning Results with Google Adwords

Strategy, architecture, testing, patience - hasty efforts can make things worse - be careful at what you change quickly
be careful at what we approach randomly - is the pattern a true pattern or just noise?

Sometimes the problem is not taking on the right account, with no product to market, or you can’t squeeze a greater strategy out of the client. Client cites unverifiable historical data 4/1 ROAS is doable.

Client wants to reduce aggregate average CPC to .18 from .25 while increasing leads by 25%. It’s impossible to serve this type of account from an agency perspective, or in-house quite frankly.

Two types of failure: 1) Q score failure where ads won’t show; and 2) Strategy failure

Importance of relevancy, click-thru rates, etc. New accounts will mix terms across the spectrum, and Google will derail the account before its up and running. Sometimes the rescue is nearly impossible, if it’s been ‘blacklisted’.

Posted in SMX - Search Engine Land Conferences. No Comments »

 

Search Marketing 101: The Beginning

July 6th, 2008

by Laura Thieme

In 11 years+ of business, I’ve learned so much. If it hadn’t been for eating poppy seed bread in 1996, and losing my job as a result, I probably would not have started a company to provide international market research a year later. Many of you know that story, however, here’s a quick recap.

I was working for American Electric Power (AEP), www.aep.com, in 1995. I started as an Internet research assistant, and spent hours creating databases for the economic development department. I often visited the North Market, a nearby farmers’ market, where I frequently purchased Highlands bread, which would later cause me to lose my job at AEP. I did get my job back, after a week of meetings and other events, and learned that not everything in black and white was believable or correctly interpreted. I learned a lot about human nature. I learned the value of fighting for what you believed in. While I got my job back, my reputation was pretty much ruined. I lost my job again in less than a year. I had also suffered a torn ACL from a skiing accident at the end of 1996, which was the beginning of an eight-month recovery ordeal. I would have physical therapy three times a week, which is brutal to say the least. Your body does wierd things under that much stress. An incident occurred one night late at work, around 8 or 9 at night. I was working - no one was there - as was often the case. The days before you had the luxury of a laptop to take home. Something happened to my body that I couldn’t explain. I knew something was wrong. I was soon tested for Multiple Sclerosis (MS), thankfully which turned out to be negative. I’ve since been tested again, which was negative thankfully. Nasty disease. Fast forward to June 1997, less than a month after a very successful public speaking engagement at the Ohio Development Association (ODA) annual meeting, I lost my job again. I had consulting job offers. I had a teaching position offer. Everything seemed to be going great. I was even asked to go to India, with AEP’s dereg group. But then things started to take a turn quickly - within a couple of weeks. No matter what I did to prove my value - I could see that someone in particular wanted me gone at AEP. I anticipated it - I saw the warning signs - but I was determined to do the right thing, and show my value to the last minute with a smile. I was just not meant to be at AEP. I started my company on June 4, 1997. I landed my first research project in September 1997.

In November of 1997, I offered a seminar showing local business owners how to use the Internet search engines for research. I had put together a very simple website over a weekend, and metatagged it, and submitted it to the search engines. Within days, I had top rankings for keywords related to my services. I wanted to demonstrate to the business owners how marketers can affect the way we do research. Attendees were far more interested in how I got my website to the top of the search engines. Within six months, in May of 1998, I was offering the search marketing service to business owners.

The days of metatags and search engine submission services as a form of search engine marketing are long over. In fact, not since 2000, has that been a viable search marketing service on its own. In that year, I noticed that retailers were becoming more interested in return on investment, notably small businesses. I began to find that search marketing tools, called web analytics tools, were as valuable if not moreso than tracking a site’s keyword visibility. If you could prove traffic resulted from visibility, that was a measure of success. If you could prove sales resulted, that was another form of success. If you could prove that acquisition costs were acceptable, as well as customer lifetime value (CLV), that was the ultimate success.

Imagine that when I began in this industry, Google did not even exist. There is not a day that I pick up the NYT, or WSJ (which is not everyday mind you), that Google is not in the news. It’s recent story headline - about how much employees have to pay for daycare/childcare. 19,000 or more employees. There is a Google campus, much like you might find at major corporations. 19,000 - AEP had 22,000 when I worked for them downtown. Imagine that type of growth in just 10 years. Imagine the management challenges…. whew!

This industry as matured greatly in the past 11 years. It’s been referred to as a cottage industry, with jargon such as SEO, search engine optimization, website marketing, search marketing, PPC or CPC bid management, web analytics and voodoo amongst many other words.
However, one thing is for sure, if you know search marketing, you remain valuable and it could get you through a tough economy. It got me through 9/11, the dot-com failures, and today’s current economy. Major companies have risen to the top of the industry, many of whom have been acquired. Few search marketing companies have failed, that were notable to begin with. Search engines have failed faster. But companies that know how to utilize search for marketing purposes have not failed as easily.

I’ll be compiling the basics to the advanced of today’s search marketing in the coming weeks here online. If you want to subscribe, to the feed, click on the RSS feed link to the right. I’ll be focusing on what you really need to know when it comes to all those search marketing and analytics tools. I’ll be focusing on the executive perspective, above all else, because we all know your time is limited. What is you really need to know?

How to increase sales at a profit? What information should you be paying attention to? That’s what I’ll be writing about in the coming weeks and months.

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The Keys to Successful SEO - Part 5 of a 5 Part Series

March 25th, 2008

The Keys to Successful SEO - Part 5 of a 5 Part Series on Why SEO Doesn’t & Won’t Work
by Laura Thieme

It’s nearly 4 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. I can’t sleep. Monroe, my tuxedo cat, woke me up, and quite frankly I’m not sure I mind - I was dreaming about ghosts in the basement and watering the vegetable garden - see what happens when you watch “Medium” at 10 p.m. at night. I’m going to have to boycott that show.

Misha who is purring in my ear now, is petitioning for a “midnight” snack. I’m not sure what I’m more afraid of, not being able to return to sleep before it’s “time to get up” or waking the dog. Once I get up, then the cats have to be fed, the dog wants to be let outside, and then it’s all over. No chance of getting back to sleep, but do I care? My mind is active on many fronts - and I suspect it has a lot to do with my class at OSU starting today. But the mind also wandered into web analytics, which is a large part of what I’m teaching my class on at Ohio State. In fact, I’ve redone several parts of the syllabus to put more emphasis on web analytics.

We’re starting the class this year with five sessions on web analytics, instead of ending the class with web analytics. The focus won’t be on visibility first, it’s going to be on web analytics first, because it’s all about continuously proving value to your client (internal or external) on your web marketing budget. Today, I was on a prospective client call. It was our second call into the “relationship”. The company said something that I really liked hearing. They said, “some companies won’t even work with us if we don’t use web analytics”. Isn’t that great???? I loved it!!! I don’t use exclamation marks very often either :-)

I had asked the company in my first call if they had any form of web analytics? Did they have Google Adwords? Did they have Google Analytics? They had neither. And before you SEO and analytics experts scoff, these people understand the value of investing in meaningful data - they just need a little education on the process. In fact, they are moving forward on making a few minor changes to their website and installing Google Analytics before we proceed, regardless of whether “we” get the deal. So why do I care so much about web analytics, and why am I willing to write about it at 4:10 a.m. in the morning?

If you don’t have a robust web analytics package installed, you’re not able to intelligently answer “what’s wrong and what’s right with my website?” Granted, with web analytics, you will indeed have to make some inferences regarding what’s wrong, what’s right. And in fact, you won’t really know the specific experience analysis (see Avinash Kaushik’s book on Web Analytics, An Hour a Day, Chapter 1), unless you survey your customers. You can only make observations based on the web analytics data.

However, it’s the time that goes into the web analytics process that can be daunting - mindless at times - and like looking for meaning in your life while walking on the beach and looking out at the ocean (not that you or I have ever experienced the latter). What can make web analytics painful, and at times useless? It’s the tool, baby! Well, that and a little methodology or lack thereof.

So, how do you get a good web analytics tool? And how can it help you with your SEO efforts, which is what this series is all about? Do I need a part 6 of this 5-part series? Let’s start with Google Analytics because that’s what at a minimum, most of us should have this application installed (javascript code on your website) if we’re doing SEO and paid search (which is what you should all be doing). And why do you need web analytics again? Because you’re going to learn which keyword phrase(s) send you the lead, make your phone “ring, ring”, and your cash machine ka-ching, ka-ching! (Sorry, it’s 4 a.m.) Start with Google Analytics because it’s relatively painless, and it’s free - go figure!

With Google Analytics you can get alot of info about what’s working and what’s not with your online advertising campaign, or your website in general. It’s not perfect, the data may not reconcile, and quite frankly, if it’s not installed correctly, it could be relatively useless. But in general, Google Analytics makes my life as an SEO expert, and a search marketing guru, much easier to show the client value in which keyword converts to a lead or an online sale.

Now having said this, it’s knowing where in Google Analytics you need to go to figure the answer out to “what’s working, what’s not”. I am guilty of long posts, so I’m going to start another page in the event you want to “read on about web analytics!”.

Posted in Ohio State University Fisher College of Business, Search Optimization (SEO), Web Analytics. 1 Comment »