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SES NY Day 1: Analytics into Action

March 18th, 2008 Jason Posted in SES, conferences |

Official pitch:

How can you translate analytics data into meaningful, actionable, recommendations for improvement of an SEO strategy? The focus is on ACTION.

Matt Bailey opened with an excellent presentation arguing that the traffic stats by which we live and die are nothing if we’re not actually doing the analysis to put them in context. If, as he says, we simply report the numbers, we then spend the rest of the month justifying them; analysis provides the ability to identify actionable changes, backed by the data, and drive progress.

Using his brilliant example of the Red Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek (also summed up on the aimClear blog), the backbone of the presentation emphasized the importance of segmenting your data to get a clear view of what the numbers really mean.  Since he’s got the whole thing out there on the blog I’ll not go into all the details, but here’s his summary:

Of the elements that helped to provide this analysis, segmentation was key. Segmentation of groups allows for comparisons. Comparisons allow you to spot trends that by be different from the rest. Asking questions of the data allows you to dig into specific trends and spot additional factors that have affects the original analysis. Unless we dug into Kirk’s personal life, we may never have spotted the contrast of Kirk’s attraction to alien females as it related to saving red-shirt crewmen’s lives.

This definitely had me thinking about how we’re currently slicing and dicing in WebTrends. We’re generally measuring visits to conversions, and are of course segmenting by search term and referrer, but I think there’s far more we can be doing. Matt drove home the idea that as well as benchmarking vs. our competitor traffic information, if we aren’t fully looking at how our users are using our own site, we’re missing opportunities. This will be prompting some further research when I’m back in the office.

Steve Keller followed up with his look at how he shifted his PPC campaigns from a CPC model to what he called ROAS - Return on Ad Spend. By adjusting both their method of estimating customer value and how their bid management partner used analytics data they provided, they were able to deliver much better traffic, focused to the right version of their product, and improved their returns significantly. Admittedly, since I’m not doing paid search at all, this left me a little dry, but it did make me want to refresh on just how we’re defining ROI on our organic traffic.