This is a write up of the panel session “Credit where Credit is due: Demystifying Attribution” at SMX London 2011.
Chris started this session by discussing the value of the keyword in terms of conversion rate and sales. This is a discussion that often uses the last click wins mentality when calculating ROI values. Attribution is often far more complex than this and this session aimed to clarify many approaches.
The following are the top tips from each presentation:
Matt Bailey: Founder of Site Logic focused on missing pieces
Matt started by saying you need to establish how you are to be measured at the beginning of every project. Define how accountable you are to that. There may be things that are out of your control. Increased leads don’t necessarily mean increased profits so make sure you have an accurate picture.
Defining your lead value is vitally important and working out what it is based on is essential in the planning phase. If you are held accountable to the revenue generated you need to incorporate your analytics into a CRM and question the data that comes back from the CRM.
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Next up are Pete Young from Brilliant Media (and State of Search blogger!) and Matthew Bailey from Site Logic Marketing talking on how to look beyond the basic/obvious metrics such as PageRank, indexed pages etc. and further into metrics that can make big changes to your company and your ROI. Moderating the panel is Brian Clifton, author of Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics.
So what does meaningful metrics mean? Brian Clifton gives a little background – firstly we have to consider two different types. Firstly there’s the nicely controlled on-site metric – what visitors are doing on your site, what they buy, where they come from, how long they stay. The majority of these are all within our control. Off-site metrics are quite different. People talking about your brand, tweets, mentions – how do we compare these metrics alongside one another and gain meaningful insight from them? (more…)
In Europe we all know that the ‘marriage’ between German officials, government and other regulators, is not the best marriage you can have. They keep having issues. The Streetview blockage of specific houses is one of them, but a bigger problem is how the German regulators look at Google Analytics. Now the marriage seems to have been busted all together.
In an interview with German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” the German commissioner for data protection in Hamburg Johannes Caspar stated that the regulators have stopped talks with Google and that the use of Google Analytics should be illegal. (more…)
Today in Zurich Switzerland a lot of high placed people come together. They are all anxious to find out who will be organizing the FIFA World Cup Football in 2018 (and 2022, but we’ll focus on the 2018 one here). The final round is between four candidates: Netherlands/Belgium, Spain/Portugal, England and Russia.
During the day the four candidates can make their final impressions on the members of the FIFA who will be casting their votes in the afternoon. In the countries which are candidates this topic has been in the media a lot in the past few days. And almost everybody says the decision has not been made yet and that it all comes down to the last day. Also everybody says that its very important for the FIFA members to know how the support is within the countries. That is difficult to measure.
But maybe we can help the decision makers in Zurich a little bit to see if we can find out what the general feeling is in the different countries. And since we are heavy online users, we’ll be using some online tools to find that out. After all, we always say that online can tell us everything about how people feel, what they are doing and that we can predict based on these numbers. Lets see if we can find out who should be winning the bid… We’ll be using the four big sources on the web currently: Google, Facebook, Twitter and Bing. And we’ll be only using the free available tools they offer. (more…)
The new Google feature instant previews, with which you can ‘preview’ a page in the Google SERPS, has been ‘corrupting’ the numbers of viewers on the specific page in Google Analytics for the past few weeks. Because of an ‘issue’ in Analytics each time somebody looked at the preview was counted as a view in Google Analytics even though the visitor had never actually visited the page itself.
Google now tells us on their Analytics blog that they have “fixed this issue, and visits from Google Instant Preview will no longer show up in your Analytics account”. They will not be reprocessing the data to remove past visits. (more…)
According to Mashable Twitter has released its new Analytics Tool to a select group of users to start testing out the product. This means the launch is not far away.
The new tool is probably a welcome add on to the existing tools out there. It is mainly focussed on the stuff people can see about their own account: which tweets are successful, how many retweets did you get, what caused people to follow and unfollow etcetera.
The tool will be a competitor to other similar tools with which you can already do stuff like this. It looks however that Twitter is going to give this one out for free. At least in the beginning. That will most probably make it a very much used tool. (more…)
Back in the days when Google Analytics wasn’t as powerful as it is now and when there were great alternatives on the market there was one tool which rocked them all: Indextools. Indextools was run by Dennis Mortensen, a webanalytics expert from Denmark. He made the tool big.
Right at the time that Indextools was becoming a serious alternative to Google Analytics Mortensen decided it was time for a drastic change: Indextools was sold to Yahoo. Mortensen went along with Indextools to Yahoo.
At first the excitement was big. Yahoo could really be a good place for Indextools and if “Microhoo” would come through two great tools (Indextools and Gatineau) would be joining forces and would be the biggest best tool out there. (more…)
Google Analytics for many is a highly underestimated tool. My guess is that still the major part of the Analytics users ‘only’ looks at the incoming traffic numbers. How many visitors did we get yesterday? The question “where did they come from” even is too much information for some.
Luckily there are others who do understand the full potential of the free analytics tool and use all the features Google is giving us. And those users will be happy with the latest change Google made to Analytics: “Major Contributors“. (more…)
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