Website Analytics

During the .com boom of 1999 and 2000 there were huge sums of money invested into the Internet, much of which was lost. We are now in the middle of a far larger boom however this time it has been founded on real probability and detailed information.

With this in mind this new fangled Search Engine Marketing or SEM services have grown in strength and is now recognised as an important area of the overall marketing mix. This boom is evident by not only the ever increasing amount of money spent on SEM but also by the ever increasing popularity and brand awareness of Google and the other search engines. However lessons have been learnt and therefore brand and marketing managers need to prove success of any marketing source.

Within the SEM market place this drive for information has meant that paid search has been the leader, no matter how potentially expensive. Organic SEO was always recognised as some black art that although far more cost effective was very difficult to track and therefore was not worth the investment needed. With the ever increasing market awareness of the benefits of organic SEO, online marketing managers are looking to their website analytics providers or for that matter their SEO provider, to show them a clearer picture of whether their expenditure is delivering the goods.

The web analytic vendors, ever keen to satisfy the demands of their customers, are attempting to provide some much needed science to this area, although there are many who would state that website analytics is as much an art as a science. Any half decent website analytics offering can provide support for online marketing campaigns such as banner advertising, email and so on, and SEO can be treated by most website analytics systems as another online marketing campaign. So job done? No, not quite.

SEM has its own special demands on website analytics, and their users, and website analytics vendors need to address these. Most website analytics systems support campaigns such as email campaigns, banner ads or advertising associated with keywords in a search engine. If you are using a few keywords when advertising on a search engine then you can manage the advertising associated with each individual keyword as a separate campaign. If successful, the next stage will include ramping up the number of keywords to say 50 or 100.

Unless the website analytics system provides specific support, you have work to do – either a huge administrative load of setting up an online marketing campaign for each keyword, or lumping all the keywords together in one online marketing campaign and losing a lot of detailed information. The magic metric in assessing the success of any online marketing campaign is return on investment (ROI). Website analytics vendors will drone on about how their offering will provide online marketing ROI during their sales pitches.

Before we discuss the return element of ROI, SEM causes some issues when we try and get a fix on investment. As the search engines use an auction style variable pricing system it is difficult to predict exactly how much an SEM campaign will cost. It is perfectly feasible to copy the information from the search engine administration system into a spreadsheet, and indeed many analysts do. A much more elegant solution, and one that reduces the amount of keyboard bashing, is for the web analytics system to interact with the search engine to obtain keyword and cost information so that a comprehensive picture can be obtained.

There are a number of website analytics solutions that can track return in terms of e-commerce sales volume. This in my opinion is too simplistic because sales value does not reflect true profitability as some products have different margins to others. Furthermore, the end objective of a lot of websites is not exclusively online sales. The website may be designed to drive calls to a call centre or stimulate a sale which is completed offline e.g. estate agents and recruitment.

Website analytics vendors need to raise their game to provide solutions that can work with these websites and their SEM. In all the excitement surrounding SEM, its little sister, search engine optimisation (SEO), is often overlooked. Here a website appears within search engine results due to its content rather than due to paid positioning. This natural traffic can be improved by optimising the website for search engines. The more savvy agencies are switched on to this and promote SEO as complimentary to SEM. From a web analytics point of view it is