Turning Your Web Analytics into a Money Making Machine #SESSJ

This Search Engine Strategies session was an engaging discussion about how to utilize your Web Analytics tool to make more money.  Who wouldn’t want that, especially in this economy, right? 

Smart Paid Search includes taking information from the referrer to improve the experience on the landing page.  For example, if your visitor clicked on your paid search ad when searched for “flights from SFO to NYC”, then make sure your landing page pre-fills “SFO” and “NYC”.  Only 1 of 5 examples actually did this.

And don’t forget to look at:

1. Bounce by page and keyword referral to identify improvements to pages.
2. Days to purchase by segmentation and compare segmentations to match behavior with results
3. Match types to determine what the raw query strings are.  Few analytics solutions actually capture raw query strings.

Revenue is good, but you must also look at cost, gross profit, and most importantly net profit.

In an example presented, a Luxury Car Company thought that they shouldn’t buy paid search on their brand keywords.  So they ran an experiment…  While the brand keyword paid search experiment yielded some cannibalization (11%), the gains were significant and far outweighed the investment.  They allowed the data to drive their decision instead of their hypothesis.  The point here is we should move from opinion to hypothesis.

Google Insights and Google Ad Planners provide some great insights for competitive research.

3 Tips to Making More money with Web Analytics:

1. Prioritizing – prioritize based on best opportunities and resources to improve it
2. Segmentation – it’s important to be segmenting KPI’s to determine opportunities to improve.
3. Always be testing – you should always be testing new things to determine to be better than average

Go to www.usertesting.com and type in “AlwaysTestingSJ” for 2 free tests – a $58 value.

3 More Tips to Making More Money with Web Analytics:

1. Optimize the basket – to determine where there’s fall-off
2. Determine the visit value – based on time on site, pageviews, events, personally identifyable information, purchase, cart value, profitability
3. Determine attribution – they come and go, come and go, etc.  But it can help with assist keywords in the evaluation phase

• Moderator:
  Mike Grehan, SES Advisory Board Co-Chair ,

• Speakers:
  Bryan Eisenberg, SES Advisory Board & Co-Founder, Future Now, Inc.
  Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist, Google
  Jim Sterne, Chairman, Web Analytics Association

Tagged as: Paid Search, Search Engine Strategies, ses san jose, ses san jose 2009