High Rankings Advisor Issue 025

Measuring Search Engine Success: Rankings and Traffic

Wednesday, September 04, 2002

~~~Notes from Search Engine Strategies Conference~~~

++Measuring Success (Part One)++

For today's guest article on the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference, I'm pleased to have Stacy Williams on board. Stacy is the founder and President of Prominent Placement, Inc., a strategic search engine marketing firm that offers search engine optimization, directory submissions, pay-per-click campaigns and linking campaigns. I've read Stacy's posts and articles on the Net for years, and almost always agree with what she writes. So listen up closely as she summarizes the "Measuring Success" session from SES San Jose 2002.

Guest Article
Measuring Success: Rankings and Traffic
Stacy Williams, Prominent Placement, Inc.

The sessions on "Measuring Success" at Search Engine Strategies alone were worth the price of admission. Seven different speakers presented a wide array of information on the topic of measuring search engine marketing success. Two started their presentations with the same quote from the Gartner Group, which explains the importance of this topic:

"It has long been said you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Nowhere is this more true than on the Web - where examining what works and what doesn't directly influences the bottom line."

Kevin Lee, CEO of Did-it.com, Inc., correctly pointed out something that may seem obvious, but is often forgotten. Before we can measure success, we have to define it. Success means different things to different organizations or departments. Is success defined as online orders, orders placed offline after browsing online, registration for a newsletter, a lead form filled out, page views, time spent on a site, return visits, reduced customer service calls or is it the dreaded success metric of the CEO liking to see a #1 ranking?

After defining success for your company and your web site, you can measure it and then determine what actions need to be taken in order to increase it. Three broad categories for levels of measurement were discussed. They range from roughly the easiest to measure (but the least informative) to the more in-depth (and more enlightening). These types of measurements are rankings, traffic and conversions/ROI. This is such a big topic that I'm going to break it into two different articles. Today, I'll talk about rankings and traffic. Next week, I'll cover the holy grail - conversions and ROI.

The speakers didn't spend a lot of time discussing measuring rankings. The two market leaders for ranking software were briefly reviewed, WebPosition Gold by FirstPlace Software, Inc. and TopDog Pro by Top Dog Software. Rankings were not dwelled upon, partly because they're being deemed less and less important. We all like to see high rankings, but unless they translate into visitors - and then conversions - they're not worth much.

Laura Thieme, President and Founder of Bizresearch, Inc. had a good point about rankings that is often overlooked. She reminded the audience that pay-per-click campaigns (paid listings on Overture, Google AdWords Select, etc.) and "organic" SEO (traditional optimization of a site's pages) can work hand-in-hand. It often makes sense to only bid for paid listings on search terms that you can't attain high rankings on through organic SEO, due to those terms being too competitive or for other reasons. There's certainly no reason to bid on terms for which you're already ranked high naturally.

For ecommerce sites, Laura reminded us to do price comparisons. Whether you're undergoing a pay-per-click campaign or traditional SEO, it may not do you much good to get a #1 ranking if the #2 and #3 sites are discounters with lower prices than yours. Think like a prospective customer - he or she is going to compare prices between the various sites. So if you can't win one particular battle, it's better to focus on different products or different search terms where you can win.

In terms of measuring site traffic, Laura pointed out that PositionTech, one of Inktomi's Search/Submit inclusion program partners, allows customers to track click-through activity, daily traffic, actual search terms used and average search position for the web pages submitted through its program.

There are a myriad of other web analytic software tools that measure site traffic including Urchin and LiveStats by DeepMetrix, as well as WebTrends and HitBox (I'll cover the latter two in more depth next week). Many of you are probably already familiar with the type of data these tools report on, including number of visitors, referring URL (the site the visitor came from, including search engines), pages viewed, etc.

Bryan Eisenberg, Chief Information Officer for Future Now, Inc. is a conversion rate marketing specialist who provided a lot of good information about traffic statistics and different ways to analyze them. We all know there's a big drop-off between the number of people who land on a site's home page and the number of people who make their way through the site and take an action, whether that be placing an order or filling out a lead form. Bryan calls this loss a "leaky bucket" and suggests that analyzing traffic and conversion data can help us plug those leaks. Making a purchase on a site is a "macro action" which is arrived at by taking multiple "micro actions."

Traffic data that can show what's working on your site and what isn't includes top referring sites, new vs. returning visitors, frequency of visits, most popular pages, single access pages, top entry and exit pages, top paths through the site and time spent on each page. For example, what's your reject rate (number of single page visits divided by total visits)? What's your heavy user share (number of visitors that went to 10 or more pages divided by total visits)?

Bryan pointed out that a click is an implied question that must be answered and satisfied. Site owners should create an easy-to-follow funnel, or path, through the site that creates sales momentum by using that tried-and-true marketing adage: build awareness, interest, desire, action and then satisfaction. As Kevin remarked, everyone talks about shopping cart abandonment, but we have to think about the rest of the site - any site abandonment is a lost opportunity.

To wrap up this week's article, I'll quote John Simpson, Product Marketing Manager for the WebTrends division of NetIQ Corporation. John reminded us that there are really two marketing objectives. First, we want to drive more qualified visitors to our web sites. Second, we want to convert more visitors on our sites. Next week I'll discuss the ultimate goal - conversions and ROI.

Stacy Williams