Measurement

In business, if you don’t track something there is little way to know if it’s effective. A website is no different- if you have a website and you’re not tracking traffic coming to the site, the website is just another expense in your business. Website tracking is easy to implement with Google Analytics, a free website traffic tracking tool.

3 Mistakes You May Have Made

Many businesses come to us with pre-existing websites, but have not been tracking their website traffic at all. The reasons are across the board, but usually have something to do with:

1. The web team didn’t setup the tracking because you didn’t ask them to. In most cases, the web team will know how to install the tracking system, but don’t make this part of their main service offering since it’s another thing to do on the project. Make sure you ask your web team to install Google Analytics (See below).
2. The web team charges an extra fee to implement tracking, so you chose not to do it. This can be a little bit of a red flag regarding your web team, as implementing Google Analytics on most websites is a quick 20-30 minute job and (in our opinion) should be baked into any web development project. However, it’s worth the extra fee to have it completed so that you can measure your website’s effectiveness in driving revenue for your business.
3. The web team setup tracking, but used their own account to set it up. For example, the web team may have their own Google Analytics account and then setup your website underneath their account. While this still ensures your website is being tracked, it’s risky because they own the data. Getting the data and transferring the data to your own account in the future can be a bit of a challenge.

4 Steps to Setting Up Your Website Tracking Easily

If you’re in the process of creating a new website, here are 4 steps to take to ensure that your website tracking is in place.

1. Create your own Google Analytics account, as this will enable you to have access to the data forever regardless of various web teams you work with in the future. The signup process takes minutes at Google.com/Analytics.
2. Ask your current web team to implement the Google Analytics tracking code on the website, which usually takes about 20-30 minutes depending on the type of website you have. Google Analytics will also give you instructions to provide to the web designer to make this easy for you.
3. Ensure the website is tracking all traffic successfully. This can be done by verifying the code in the Google Analytics account (there is a “status” section you can review). There are also tools you can use to check if Google Analytics is installed on all pages.
4. Finally, link your Google Adwords account to Google Analytics if you’re running online ads, as this will enable you to see Adwords data directly within your Google Analytics account. This isn’t a must have, but is definitely helpful if you’re running ads.

Making the sure the above steps are done on your website will save you a lot of time and frustration in the future when you decide to dive deep into the traffic of your website to figure out how to make it a more effective asset for your business.

If you would like guidance on any of the above, don’t hesitate to contact us.

While driving website traffic is a big piece of what we do for clients via increased Google rankings (i.e. “SEO”), we make it a point to ensure that the website traffic we’re growing is also growing leads and / or revenue for the client’s business. While increasing rankings sounds great, it’s not worth pursuing if it’s not eventually impacting the bottom line revenue of the business.

In every project we take on, we help clients to integrate tracking that communicates how SEO and other marketing tactics are impacting the core metrics in their business. While each client situation is unique, below are a number of tracking tactics that every business should be using.

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When running a business division or an entire company, it’s important to know how effective each of your marketing dollars are. After all, each dollar needs to be held accountable for producing revenue or it may need to be diverted to another marketing channel that is measurable.

Some web marketing channels, such as online advertising with Google Adwords, are pretty straight forward to measure:

• $### in ad costs produces ### visits
• which turns into  ### leads or sales
• which means each lead or sale costs $###).

However, when pursuing search engine optimization to increase the rankings of your business on Google (and therefore your website traffic / sales) it may seem more difficult to connect the cost of your current SEO company to a specific financial outcome.

Measuring SEO’s Value is Possible…

While understanding how SEO affects your entire organization and marketing initiatives is important, it’s also important to be able to tie your SEO budget to financial metrics.

This blog post series explains a few of the ways that we work with clients to report on SEO’s impact on their business. While each situation is unique and usually requires a conversation to cater it to a specific business, this should be a good start to help you quantify the value of SEO in your organization.

Measuring the Value of SEO Using Cost Per Lead or Sale Generated

If you’re doing any other online marketing, such as Google Adwords, you’re more than likely already measuring the cost per lead or sale generated from online ads. SEO can be measured in a similar way and oftentimes ends up producing leads and sales for a much lower cost compared to other online advertising campaigns.

Here’s the breakdown of how it’s calculated:

• How much are you paying your SEO team monthly?
• How many leads or sales are generated each month specifically from non-brand SEO traffic?
• The cost per lead or sale from SEO is the SEO budget divided by volume of leads generated.
• In short, the formula is: SEO Cost Per Lead or Sale = Monthly SEO Budget / Number of Leads or Sales Generated

Things to Consider When Valuating SEO With This Metric

Here’s a few things to consider when using this method:

• If you just started doing SEO in the past quarter (or possibly 2 quarters depending on your industry), the amount of SEO traffic you receive now is going to be relatively low compared to the amount of traffic you’ll be receiving after approximately 6 months of pursuing SEO. This is due to the time it takes for a website to get ranked on Google for competitive keywords that are going to send a lot of traffic and sales. However, once you have achieved competitive rankings your traffic will continue to grow while you can focus SEO resources on acquiring additional competitive rankings. In short, the volume of traffic and sales from SEO efforts begins to grow exponentially while the cost per SEO lead or sale drops exponentially the longer you pursue SEO.
• You must be measuring your traffic (Google Analytics is probably the easiest solution) and you segmenting the reports so that you can see data related to the traffic you receive from SEO (called “non-brand organic traffic“). This enables you to see data specifically related to SEO instead of looking at all website traffic sources at once.
• Many SEO consultants only report on rankings (i.e. “we got you ranked for “keyword ABC” this month- great!”) but don’t present data regarding traffic or sales generated from SEO. This is a red flag, as it either means that they aren’t confident in the traffic and sales SEO generates or they’re not familiar with how to actually measure the work they’re doing- either way, it’s not good for your company. Rankings are important, but are a small piece of the puzzle.

Real World Examples

Here’s some interesting things we found using this with clients:

• We have a few clients working on a lead-generation model in competitive industries. It’s not uncommon for a client to be paying $500-$1,000 per lead within their online advertising campaigns while getting leads from our SEO efforts at an effective cost of $100-$150/ea. We ensure that the quality of the SEO leads is comparable to other channels in regards to conversion / revenue, so this sheer difference in cost is a big win for lead-generation clients in boosting their overall profitability.
• We work with clients that have an e-commerce model where they’re selling some sort of product online via their web store. Oftentimes, the client hasn’t configured Google Analytics to include e-commerce metrics within the reports. In short, this enables you to see specific sales data for all of the traffic coming into your site directly within Google Analytics. If you’re running a web store, make sure this is setup as it makes reporting on granular revenue data much easier (i.e. “how much revenue was produced by keyword ABC last month?”).

How to Get Started Measuring SEO Value in Your Business

The first step to using these metrics (and others) to valuate your SEO efforts is to ensure that you connect how you measure your SEO efforts to how you measure other marketing channels so comparisons can be  made.

Feel free to leave a comment below or contact us, as we enjoy seeing clients light up when we help them establish simple metrics to measure the profitability of their business so that they can make better decisions with their marketing dollars.

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image credit: via Flickr user Brooks Elliot

When pursuing any type of marketing campaign, it’s important to measure both short term and long term results- otherwise, you won’t know which marketing campaigns are making money and which are losing money. Many new clients we meet with that are interested in pursuing search engine optimization are unsure how to measure an SEO campaign.

You may think that your website’s rankings are the most important factor, but that’s not really the case…

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Finding the best SEO company can be tough, but there are a range of tactics you can use to quickly gauge whether or not the SEO team you’re considering is truly experienced in the industry.

One unique method of gauging SEO experience is by looking at Twitter

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If you’re like many of our clients, you probably send out a lot of emails every business day (and maybe even on weekends). I personally send out 100-150 emails per day minimum which at first just seems like a whole lot of work…

But we actually generate website traffic from the emails we send…

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In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google Analytics can be a very useful tool. Reports can be tailored using some custom features of the system. This gives valuable information that can be used in analyzing how to increase revenue on a site.

In a post by Sajeet Nair on SEOmoz, he used some custom reports to find out how he could increase revenue on a website.  While reviewing the reports it was discovered that a couple of the browsers (Opera, Opera Mini) had about the same number of visits, but one had higher revenue. While analyzing this, it was noticed that one of the other browsers (Android) had fewer visits but was receiving over 5000% more revenue when compared to Opera and Opera Mini.

The discovery was made that when searching for the website on these three browsers, both Opera and Opera Mini (which is a mobile browser) link to the desktop versions of the website, but Android links to the mobile version of the website.  The takeaway form this analysis is that when mobile users were taken to the mobile version of the site, then revenue will improve.

For a review of your website to understand if you are missing out on revenue or if you have any questions, feel free to contact us or comment below.

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Image credit: Via Flickr user welendcashhouston