In further refining our search knowledge to understand how users are interacting with our site, we may want to track the initial referring search from SEO or paid search, and the following site search query (if any). Tracking the secondary search terms provides further insight into how users refine their searches: users may be coming to the site on a very general term, then refining their search on the entry page.

You can use the data you collect to help reduce bounce rates. For every user that refines her search through your site upon entry, there are plenty of users who do not. By applying what you learn from the more determined users to the less determined users, you may be able to lower bounce rates for that segment of traffic. For example, suppose you find that large volumes of traffic come to a page on your site from the term “red cars,” and that many of these users go on to do secondary searches on your site for “sports cars.”

Assess the landing page, and determine if there is any content on the page relevant to “sports cars” (or links to such content elsewhere on your site). If there is, is it prominently displayed on the page? If not, move the content around on the page (or provide cross-links to help the user find her way to the content). Again, I cannot stress enough how effective A/B testing is for improving the usability of your site, not just from a search perspective but from a user perspective, too. You can run A/B or multivariate tests to try out different wordings of section titles, different imagery, or alternate positionings of content on a page.

Tracking on-site follow-up searches to referring search terms can also provide you with insight into what your users see as relevant content. You may discover that you have the wrong page organically ranking for a certain term, and you may need to focus on getting a different page to rank organically for that same term. Understanding the traffic you are getting and the language your visitors use will help you ensure that you are presenting them with relevant content earlier in their experience with your site as opposed to forcing them to find the content through their own clicking and determination.

You will not be able to satisfy all people all of the time, and you will have to learn where and when to draw the line. Otherwise, you will find that you are constantly trying to optimize your content to other sets of terms. To make sure you don’t get stuck in this cycle, use the data you have access to in order to determine which changes will likely improve revenue the most.

You should consider setting two statistical bars. The first will determine what percentage of people arriving at your site from external search go on to use your site search. This may range from 3% to 30%, or more or less; it depends on the content and the users. The second bar to set is the volume of secondary searches you may see on a term before you decide to incorporate content related to that term into your landing page. Where you set this bar will depend on the page itself, your ability to modify the content, and whether you feel the secondary search term is highly relevant to the topic of the page.

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Your site search provides a rich idea of what your website encompasses. It can be thought of as a navigational tool, providing an index of all the pages on your site and how they are related. Further, as we have seen, you can track referring search terms and follow-up site search terms to get a better idea of what visitors to your site are really looking for. Knowing this, you can get into more sophisticated uses of your data. If you can track what terms brought a person to your site, you can apply a secondary search against your site search engine and return the results dynamically in your web page, to further aid your user in navigating your site (as well as correlating this data against the other related searches people have performed on your site). That is, you can basically create a section on a page that shows what other users thought was relevant or related to the landing page. You can also use site search data to refine faceted navigation elements on your site. Amazon and Google are very effective examples of this: both provide a spot where correlated or related searches are presented to the user.

Offering up related searches can provide a more predictive path through your site. Providing refinements (facets) based on data you have already collected can also help you retain users, by ensuring that you return results you know to be relevant. While developing these sorts of real-time applications that utilize your site statistics is beyond the scope of this book, this example illustrates how you can move from using data from search in a reactionary manner to providing a real-time service to your end users. All the user engagement information you need is already available based on site search and SEO traffic and terms.

If you can track what terms brought a person to your site, you can apply a secondary search against your site search engine and return the results dynamically in your web page, to further aid your user in navigating your site (as well as correlating this data against the other related searches people have performed on your site). That is, you can basically create a section on a page that shows what other users thought was relevant or related to the landing page.

Establishing real-time applications that draw upon your search analytics data unleashes the power of the information you have been collecting. You can use this data everywhere from your home page, through to articles, to products. Integrating search data into your site to provide navigation points dynamically uses the voice of your customer to build data elements and can provide relevant links between your content that you may never have thought of.

You will begin to see that everything we have been tracking through SEO and paid search can provide data points to apply to your site search. You can even take SEO and paid search queries and track their pathing through your site to further aid in optimizing your site search algorithm. Providing a set of related searches, as well as a set of results that show that people who looked at page “A” also looked at page “B,” may further improve the usability of your site. These are again all features that will require A/B or multivariate testing on your end, but they are also features that can be enabled through the data you have collected.

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Site search can also provide a better understanding of search funnels, or keyword pathing. Search funnels are when you get a search followed by a second search. To get any sort of insights, though, we need to look at the data in aggregate.

A typical search, where we see a keyword followed by several related searches. This investigation may also prove valuable in discovering where your site search is breaking down. Searches followed by further searches usually indicate two things: the first is an unsuccessful search result, where refinement occurs because of irrelevant content, and the second is a successful result delivering content that requires further investigation. How can you distinguish the two? You can’t, really. This will require some good old-fashioned investigation by clicking and following the paths of your users. Then you will need to make some assumptions about what the users were looking for or saw.

Looking at site search patterns gives us a very unique insight into how users string words and terms together. You can capture searches in Google Analytics along with the other related terms that were searched. More advanced analytics tools can be adjusted to allow for tracking the search path or entire paths through a site. In analyzing your pathing reports, you should look for reports with multiple interactions with site search.

You should be able to track the original search term, the page clicked to, the following search term, and the following page clicked to. As you start to see these patterns, you can look for multiple instances of the same patterns occurring, and for any evolution in these patterns. This can help you identify pages that could be improved with the addition of cross-linkages, as well as potential problems with your content. People who search for a term and then repeat a search for a very similar term are very easily categorized as having gotten unsatisfactory search results.

Folks who do a broad search and then a more narrow version of that search give you a better idea of how search refinement may work. One trick you can use with Google Analytics to capture data on search refinement is to include a refinement option for users to select. For example, you can include a category drop-down in your site search, allowing users to select whether they’re looking for pages related to products, news, support, and so on. Google Analytics can capture that selection as well as the search term.

Capturing these refinements in site search can help you improve your landing pages for your site search users, but you may also be able to apply this data to your SEO or paid search campaigns. The caveat here is that site search users who are familiar with your products and are searching for a specific product may lean toward support, as they are already users (as opposed to people new to your products who may be looking to purchase). There is no easy answer here; your analytics tools will provide you with insights into the areas to target, but you will need to do some A/B or multivariate testing to validate what works for SEO/paid search traffic as opposed to site search users. There will always be some differences in usage, but there is still data that can correlate and provide indications as to what areas you should be focusing on. Utilize this data and apply where and when you can both what the analytics tell you and what your own investigations into the data and the user experience reveal.

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Site search can provide a wealth of information, potentially providing more insight into the users’ search patterns and behavior than any other of your search touch points. Site search, when tracked, can return any and all variations of search patterns people utilize on your site. Granted, you are dealing with a specific segment of users who are likely familiar with your products, services, or offerings, but still, you have access to valuable raw search data.

Depending on the volume of traffic your site gets, you may or may not be able to glean useful insights from site search patterns. However, if you can establish some patterns of site search, you may be able to figure out where in the search path you have gaps.

Search leads from SEO only deliver traffic that the search engines feel is relevant to your site, while paid search only provides traffic through words you think are relevant to your site. Site search allows you to see what your customers are actually entering as search terms without the search engine or your assumptions interfering in the query to be tracked. Enabling the management of site search should be a top priority, not just to help you improve your other search campaigns but also to improve the usefulness of your website. You should not be surprised if your site search is one of the most-used sections of your website, especially if you have a very large site.

Utilizing site search to build keyword lists to sample for both SEO and paid search may prove very fruitful. Once you’ve identified the most frequently searched terms on your site, you can compare those terms against the terms that drive traffic to your site via organic and paid search. Begin with your SEO keywords. Terms that are highly searched via site search should be cross-referenced against terms that appear in your SEO list. Any terms that do not appear in your SEO list should be added to a list of terms that should be tested for relevancy. For any terms that do appear in your site search list, look at the volume of traffic generated as well as the rankings of those terms in the search engine result pages. Any term that ranks poorly is also a candidate for testing. You should end up with a list of potentially relevant words. You may need to further filter this list to eliminate completely irrelevant terms. Once you have your short list, validate that these words are not in your paid search campaigns. What you are left with should be prime candidates for some paid search testing. Set up campaigns for each of these terms to validate keyword volumes as well as the quality of traffic from these search terms.

You should be tracking what has become your standard dashboard of raw traffic volumes, exit rates, conversion rates, sales assists (if trackable), and average value per visitor. You will also want to track and log who else is competing on these terms. Are they highly competitive terms, or are they low-competition terms? You may find that there is a set of terms that it never occurred to you to target with your paid search or SEO campaigns. Testing the terms in paid search allows you to perform quick evaluations with minimal spends to determine how much traffic they generate and the relevancy of that traffic. You may want to test these terms against several existing landing pages, or develop a new landing page with content you think may be relevant to searchers on these terms. To get an idea of what may work, look at the sites with the top SEO rankings on these terms.

While you can use tools such as Google Website Optimizer for A/B and multivariate testing, you can also run these tests manually. It is important to understand how each variation differs, and what impact these changes have on your results. Build up a test case for these keywords and log how the terms perform against different landing pages. Using paid search to deliver traffic. Landing pages and entry points can and do impact revenue. Beyond landing pages, users may hit other pages, all of which can be tracked in your clickstream data. We can see that page-1 has the highest average value per visitor and the highest conversion rate. As this appears to be the most successful landing page, I would focus on this page for capturing elements to improve conversions and maximize revenue.

Building out a new page for a second set of paid search tests would be beneficial before investing heavily in SEO activity. Test this page against your new baseline metrics and validate how it compares against the current pages. I would set this page up as a noindex page for the search spiders, as it will eventually replace an existing page on the site.

You will want to maintain that old page’s inbound links, and page rank, while you’re testing out a new page to capitalize on improving conversions and assists. When you do launch your new page, replace the old page. If your paid search campaign was showing positive results, you may want to continue to run that concurrently with your SEO efforts and monitor revenue from both the SEO and paid search traffic.

Using site search to expand your SEO and paid search campaigns can be a very costeffective way to build a keyword list, using terms that your customers are telling you are relevant to them. The first rule in understanding your search campaigns is to exhaust all data you have access to that provides insights directly from your customers before expanding out. The only time you would want to break this rule is if you are new to the market or if you are introducing a new product and have no footprint from which to leverage data (in which case, you may look for third-party case studies or other sources of data).

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SEO, paid search, and site search each offer a unique opportunity to understand the mind-set and the interconnected thoughts of the people who are looking for your content. The one downside to this data is that it is drawn from people who have already found you, not from people who have not found you yet. That is, in some way or another, these people have had at least one interaction with your brand.

SEO provides insights into the relevancy of your content to a specific set of terms. There really shouldn’t be many surprises when looking at what words drive people to your website if you are in a clear and defined field or if your site has a clear and defined focus. If your website is about cars, you should expect to see a great deal of car-related terms driving traffic to the site. In this case, what you are looking for is not so much themes as language and use of words, and pairings between search terms. Looking at two- or three-word search terms can give you a better idea of associations people make when looking for your type of content. This can give you insight into language use, and you may discover geographical variations as well. If your site is an exception to the rule of one thematic element—for example, if your business is involved in many disciplines or your site hosts blogs that cover a variety of topics—there may not be a simple theme that you can expect to see driving traffic to your site. In this case, you will need to look at theme clustering, or thematic grouping. You can figure out how to do this through your analytics program.

Paid search provides a testing ground for terms whose relevancy to your market or segment you are uncertain of. Perhaps they are terms that you think are thematically relevant, but you don’t have any traffic to validate this. You can use paid search to test terms and thematic elements and to validate the quality and type of traffic you get. You can also get a sampling of interaction data based on the words and terms that drive people to your site. Looking at this, you will be able to formulate more informed strategies for both your SEO and site search campaigns.

Site search allows you to see what people are looking for on your site. They know your brand, but do they have their own terms for describing your products? Looking at the terms people search for is a good way of determining whether your product naming conventions are in sync with how your customers think about your products. Site search
is a rich source of data to gather and analyze in order to further improve your SEO and paid search campaigns. Conversely, SEO can give you some ideas of where your Site Search is lacking, based on empty site search results. The three search sources can all provide feedback to each other, in both directions.

Tools you will need in this chapter:
• Clickstream tracking package (Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, etc.)
• Spreadsheet program (Excel or something similar)
• AdWords or some other paid search tool
• A/B or multivariate testing tool (Google Website Optimizer, Test & Target, etc.)

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ROI is a key measurement and the first thing you should look at, but how do you measure ease of use? How do you know if your online experience is a positive one for most of your customers? ROI won’t tell you these things. If you plan on growing ROI, you need to understand the factors that will help you move the ROI needle. ROI is a dollar value; further analytics are needed to understand how to optimize your ROI values. These typically come in the form of measuring the user experience. Further, not all sites derive their revenue directly from sales. Facebook, for example, generates revenue through advertising, as does Google, and both have worked to create a great user experience, striving to maximize this user experience and increase profit. There is a reason why Google is the most-used engine while Overture is a thing of the past. It’s why Facebook now rules, while MySpace is circling the drain. Connecting with users, and building experiences and communities, has helped these sites grow bigger than any competitor around them.

The goal of your analytics should be to improve the overall experience for your customers. A happy customer is a good customer. In some cases, a happy customer may simply be one who finds support quickly. There isn’t direct ROI in this case; instead, you’re looking at cost savings or customer satisfaction, both of which are part of the lifetime value of a customer. If you can show that improving self-support services on your website reduces costs, you have an ROI figure you can use. And even if it doesn’t reduce costs on the support side, it may improve long-term customer loyalty. In these cases, you may need to estimate what the long-term value of a customer is. You may not be able to get an exact ROI, but you will be able to estimate the value of improving your customer experience.

Beyond ROI, you should also be looking to use your website to foster communication and dialog with your customers. People who find your site may have come with a specific intent and found that you don’t offer what they are looking for. Running voiceof-the-customer surveys on your site can help you get feedback on what you can do to improve the site experience. Dialog may not have any direct ROI attached to it in this case, but you will get an idea of what people want, and that can drive improved ROI. You may get some ideas you can use to improve your customers’ experience. You may also find that what your customers want is not what you think they need.

ROI is a value and it helps you to know if you will be profitable or not, but it can’t tell you if customers are satisfied with the service you are providing. Ideally, customers will provide feedback to help you improve the overall experience.

As we look at ROI, keep in mind that to improve it you will need to look at many other metrics and analytics, related not only to increasing traffic to your site but also to improving the user experience once people have arrived. You need to start thinking beyond delivering users, and start to think about outcomes for users. Your job is to look at this data to figure out how to maximize profit. I see this being achieved by delivering more of the right people to the right web pages, improving what people currently do when they get to your pages, and making sure your site is as findable as possible by as many people as possible.

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Businesspeople understand dollars much better than they will ever understand inbound links, HTML tags, duplicate content issues, or any number of other issues you may feel are important. If you are lucky, you will be supported by people who trust you. Often, you will need to make a business case. When presenting your ROI data, you must make clear whether you are using direct or estimated values. Setting expectations clearly builds trust. Further, once you have an ROI value, you can begin to do some really neat stuff with this data.

The best search strategists focus on conversion. Having identified your key revenue points, you have also discovered what your top-line KPIs should be. These are the points you will want to optimize and improve upon with the traffic your search programs bring in.

When we talk about actionable analytics, optimizing against data points is a big one. Successful search marketers will think like salespeople and try to move people through to success events (e.g., sales). If you identify three or four different conversion points, and you know the different values of each of them, you can look at each point, start to build up ideas on how to improve them, and begin to make informed decisions based on revenue impacts.

By estimating the extent to which you can improve each point, you can begin to figure out where to attack first to improve the bottom line. For example, if today’s revenue sits at $1,000/month, based on 10 users converting each month, you can project that doubling the number of conversion will also double the revenue each month, thus effectively doubling your investment. You can now present a current ROI and a projected ROI that will result from improving a conversion point or increasing traffic (that is, assuming that traffic converts at the same rate as before). By projecting estimates as to what you can do with your search program, you can create a better story about the opportunity that exists with the right investment. Most of this book will be dedicated to how to more accurately estimate the ROI and make decisions based on the impact it will have to your bottom line.

These improvements will come from improving your external search rankings, keywords, and targets, as well as what happens when users get to your site. While you do not have to be a user experience expert, you do need to understand how people move through your site, and what the goals of your site are.

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Estimated revenue or revenue influence is calculated by “guessing” how much revenue an action will generate. There are several online models where you do not have a direct line to impact ROI. You do, however, have influence. The following list shows direct and indirect actions that can impact ROI. Understanding attribution models such as direct influence versus indirect influence will enable you to have a much deeper understanding of your impact on ROI. Direct influences are measurable and attributed to sales through very clear channels (such as coupons, or referral IDs). Some actions may fall into both categories, depending on whether you apply a cost to them online:

• Offline sales (indirect or direct)
• Lead generation such as email opt-ins (indirect or direct)
• Relationship management such as PR and influential marketing (indirect)
• Purchases (direct)
• Downloading software (indirect or direct)
• Downloading a white paper (indirect or direct)
• Using a specific tool on your website (indirect or direct)
• Sharing content through social media (indirect or direct)
• Clicks on an ad (indirect or direct)
• Referrals to other sites (indirect or direct)

Using the example of selling products offline, you may need to make an estimate as to how many of your users will actually make a purchase offline. To arrive at this estimate, you can partner with a company such as ComScore or Compete to get industry analysis based on user panels, or you can gather data yourself by conducting surveys on your site (there are any number of online survey options, such as Survey Monkey). Surveys are a good way to find out about your users’ buying intent. You can trigger surveys after specific actions, such as using a “help me choose” tool or an interactive demo, and you can ask the respondents targeted questions such as whether they intend to purchase a product, if they found the demo useful, how much they are planning to spend, in what time frame they plan on purchasing a product, and if they have purchased anything recently. Surveys are a very useful tool when used well.

The feedback you get from survey questions such as “Do you plan on making a purchase?,” “How much do you plan to spend?,” and “When do you plan on making the purchase?” will allow you to create some estimates. Based on sampling data, you can derive the average expected spend, and how close your customers are to making a purchase. This latter point allows you to identify whether a particular action is more likely to be taken by people closer to or farther from making a purchase. Using this data, you can also see if there is a variance in average estimated revenue based on how close the customers are to making a purchase. The closer to purchase a customer is, the more likely it is that she has an idea of her budget; however, this number is typically on the low side, as the customer is shopping around and looking for the best deal. This is actually a good thing, as it’s better to use conservative estimates when setting expectations. It’s usually better to overperform than underperform.

In the case of email opt-ins or other lead-generation activities, you can establish a value per lead or name captured. Dividing the total number of leads by the average revenue generated by the leads will provide you with an average cost per acquisition.

It can be trickier to attach a monetary value to PR and marketing efforts, but it is still possible to establish an estimated impact to revenue. In very simple terms, advertising spend is typically based on the number of people it can influence—meaning that for each set of eyeballs there is a positive value or potential influence. If you understand the value of the eyeballs, you can create an online strategy that has an ROI comparable to that of your offline strategies. Consistently benchmarking across all routes to market allows for informed decision making.

Your estimated ROI will be captured as the revenue estimated through surveys and panel data to be based on an action on your website that influenced a sale that was not trackable directly by your metrics suite. The ROI formula remains the same.

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Online you can use clickstream data to track the impact certain web pages have on online sales. Capturing actual monetary values allows you to be much more specific about the return of an action. Discovering where sales happen, be they on or off your site, enables tracking of sales, providing instant insight into revenue. Further, capturing more granular data, such as information on products that are added to or removed from users’ carts but never purchased, allows you to track opportunities you may be missing out on by not improving your checkout process or other sections of your site. Understanding what roadblocks are preventing people from making purchases is critical to finding ways to enable more purchases to happen. That said, actual revenue is a great number to have access to, and most clickstream tools, such as Adobe SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics, have the ability to capture this data. Spending the time to set this up can result in valuable insights that can target revenue specifically. Your actual ROI will be captured as the revenue spent directly online or directly measurable to an action on your website. The ROI formula remains the same.

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There is one language that is understood universally across companies, and that is the language of finance. Every company is working to maximize its potential value and each one will have a different strategy for achieving this, but at the end of the day, a company can only be considered successful if it can afford to keep the lights on.

Every company has to pay taxes and every company has bills to pay. Some companies may believe in producing products that they want to use, while other companies may strive to provide the best customer experience and service possible—whatever their goals are, companies can only meet them by generating revenue.

ROI provides insights into the overall cost of an investment, taking into account everything from the marketing budget to the costs of equipment and software. There are other variations of ROI where the investment is defined differently. One of the more common variations you may see is return on ad spend (ROAS).

Here is the best way to think of the two. Suppose you are selling lemonade and you spend $25 on flyers that you put up around your neighborhood. Further suppose it costs another $25 to make that lemonade. The money you spend on flyers would be your ad spend, so you would need to make at least $25 to get a positive ROAS, while you would need to make $50 to get a positive ROI. To make this even more interesting, suppose you paid someone $25 to sit at your lemonade stand to sell the lemonade. That is another $25 that may not come out of your ad spend. Now you need to make $75 to have a positive ROI, but still only $25 for a positive ROAS.

ROI and ROAS are calculated as follows:
ROI = ((Revenue - Cost) / Cost) × 100.
ROAS = ((Revenue - Advertising Cost) / Advertising Cost) × 100
Both ROI and ROAS are expressed as percentages, hence the multiplication by 100.

For simplicity’s sake, I will use the term ROI to talk about measuring the value of an investment. Understand, however, that there are several ways to measure this, and your
own organization may have a specific way as well, depending on how budgets are split and defined.

As part of your measurement model, it is best practice to establish baselines. One of the first baselines you should establish is your ROI value. To do this, you will likely run through several stages of your analytics program. Bruce Clay uses the following framework (http://www.bruceclay.com/web_analytics.htm) that I think works very well:

Determine Needs → Identify Goals → Define Metrics → Collect Data → Record
Baseline → Test Improvement Strategies → Implement Improvements → Measure
Results → Repeat Process Periodically

we talked about understanding your business needs and goals. At this point, we are starting to define our metrics. The first metric we want to define is how to capture an ROI value. We understand how to calculate this, but now we must capture and collect it.

Because ROI is tied to monetary value, we must identify actions that generate measurable revenue. There are two approaches: actual and estimated. Actual ROI is measured when you have direct access to purchase data and the referring lead. For example, offline you can use coupons to measure the direct impact of the source of those coupons.

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First, let me come right out and say it: why do SEO and SEM people always have to prove which is more important? Why can’t we just all be search people? A well-defined search program should utilize both SEO and SEM tactics to provide maximum coverage and exposure to the right person at the right time, to maximize your revenue. I do not believe that SEO and SEM should be optimized separately from each other; in fact, there should be open sharing and examination of your overall search strategy. With that said, each practice has its own needs and methods that may be unique to it. Still, remember that the goal is to maximize your revenue by investing smartly. This means that you should invest in traffic that will convert at the maximum value for you.

Search optimization—particularly SEO—is traditionally thought of as improving the rankings of pages. Therefore, pages are optimized for search engines. My personal opinion on this is that if this is your only objective, you are doomed to fail. The simple fact is that the engines are changing every day. There are no “rules,” just best practices that have been adopted because they show positive results in rankings and can have positive results for the end user. To me, it’s not how much traffic you get that counts, but what you do with the traffic.

Your goals in improving search results should include positive impacts to your customers, and ultimately, positive impacts to your revenue streams. Optimizing entry pages for SEO is about improving the flow of traffic into your site to achieve a positive outcome for both your customers and your business. Users arriving from search should have an even better customer experience than those who enter through your home page. Search analytics are just as much about what happens on your site as what drives people to your site.

On top of all this, the online world has brought us an overwhelming multitude of information points. SEO in particular moves at such a rapid pace of change that keeping up with changes in the algorithms is practically impossible. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, claims Google uses over 200 ranking factors to establish what shows up on every organic search result (http://searchengineland.com/schmidt-listing-googles-200-ranking-factors-would-revealbusiness-secrets-51065). On top of this, there are over 500 tweaks made to the algorithm every year—more than one change per day. Optimizing to the engines is not a game you can win, but optimizing to people and their behaviors is.

Relevancy can also have an impact on paid search. Google AdWords (the largest of the paid search options) measures relevancy through Quality Score, a metric that takes into account the click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword, the historical CTR of all ads and keywords in your account, the CTR of the display URL in the ad group, the quality of your landing page, the relevance of the keyword both in the ad group and to the search query, and other factors. The better your Quality Score is during each search, the less you will pay per click. It should also be noted that the Quality Score used to determine the cost per click is generated for every search and is not a direct reflection of the Quality Score you see in AdWords (http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en
&answer=21388).

Beyond this, the real power of paid search is that you have full control over the user experience: everything from what copy and text the users will see to what pages they will be directed to. You can control the time of day results will be displayed, and you can even target specific device types (mobile or desktop) or geographies (particular cities or countries). The amount of direct and immediate control you have over your paid search campaigns means a greater opportunity to optimize and improve results. Site search can vary from site to site. How effective is your site search? How frequently is your site search used? There are a great deal of data points specific to search; the challenge is figuring out what points need to be used to answer specific sets of questions. Data only has value if it enables someone to do something.

For those of you used to practicing website measurement through Google Analytics or other clickstream tools, there will be some familiarity, though search analytics also use off-site factors, as well as user experience (UX) and information architecture (IA) factors. Some are paid and some are free, but the most important things to consider will be which tools enable you to make insights that help you meet your business needs, and which ones you feel most comfortable using. Sometimes the free options can be just as good as an enterprise-level paid option, and whenever possible.

Search analytics requires a bit of psychology; because we are dealing with words and people, we are given partial insights into our users’ thoughts. Think of a search box as a word association test. People provide a word or a group of words describing or identifying what they are looking for. The engine’s job is to interpret the user’s intent and match that word or words to the page or pages it thinks will best serve the user.

Further, a great deal of data aggregation is carried out to identify patterns that groups of searchers follow. At times you may need to make some assumptions. When you find this to be the case, I strongly urge you to use surveys to help eliminate this guesswork. Qualitative data can go a long way. For example, you can ask people on the page with the highest abandonment rate, “What are you looking for?”

When you need to make an educated guess, it’s important to remember it is just a guess. It can act as a starting place, but it’s only ever a hypothesis. Be prepared to follow a different avenue if it turns out that you are wrong. Like a good detective, you should be able to use your analytics to eventually answer questions or support theories you may have, but until you have supporting data, your hypothesis will only ever be an unproven guess. Also, because people change, you will never be able to stop measuring your site if you plan on improving sales and the user experience.

Source of Information : MASTERING SEARCH ANALYTICS MEASURING SEO, SEM AND SITE SEARCH

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Search analytics introduces some qualitative data from the search term coupled with many quantitative data points in the form of click-through rates, traffic volume, conversion rates, and more.

You can get some insight into users’ intent and decision-making processes by looking at groups of search terms as qualitative data points. For example, if a user comes to your site from three different search terms, looking at those terms may show some of the decision making that has occurred. For instance, if the search pattern looks like “ACME widgets”→“ACME widget reviews”→“ACME widget sale”, we can see that the user started out looking for a product, was then influenced by the reviews, and then looked for a discounted price. You can further amplify this qualitative data with site surveys. By bringing together qualitative data and quantitative data, we can start to get a better idea of the intent of our users, and optimize their experience.

Qualitative data measures behavior and the reasons driving that behavior. For example, surveys and questionnaires can provide qualitative data; in our case, this may also come from search parameter patterns over repeat sessions.

Quantitative data is numerical data. Examples of this are the number of visits to a website, or the number of people who purchase a product.

Clickstream data measures the actions users take on your website by tracking what and where they click.

You can get better ideas of “intent patterns” through search when you merge your external search data with your on-site search data. Perhaps many users come to your site through branded terms, meaning words that are specific to only your brand. An example of this would be a search for “iPhone”: that is specific to Apple, and there is a brand association there. When users show up from a branded term, what secondary searches do they perform on your site?

Have you enabled your clickstream analytics to capture the referring search terms and the associated site search terms? Are you recognizing that many users who come to your site on branded terms are looking for a specific product? Or perhaps there are a great number of support searches. If you have paid for the click-through SEM, maximize the value by learning what users are looking for and develop landing pages to bring this needed information closer to the user. In the case of SEO, you cannot always dictate what page will rank, but you can improve your site’s general navigation to include links to these deeper pages. Recognizing your customers’ needs and providing content that helps them will in the long run also help improve your business.

Search also gives you insight into the language of your customers. The goal of keyword research is to understand the language landscape of the search engines. What are the search volumes like, and how competitive are other sites on these terms? This is data that can be fed to other marketing channels. Why not apply this keyword research to your email deployments or your in-store flyers, bringing online and offline insights together to create subject lines and in-store banners with the language customers use?

When we talk about branded versus nonbranded words, I see all too often a confusion with internal versus external language. Internally you may want to call your product “the super best product ever!” while users may simply call it “widget.” Unless you have the dollars and branding resources to get people to change their language, you may need to recognize that it is easier to get people to think about your product by creating at least a small word association to the word “widget.” Ignoring the elephant in the room and calling your product anything but may result in people not having that “ah ha!” moment and realizing that your widget is really also “the super best product ever.” Search is as much about measuring word use and linguistic needs as it is about measuring clicks, inbound links, and other data points.

Beyond these factors, SEO has unique challenges in that all the major search engines operate as black boxes. The search engines do not let anyone know the recipe for their secret sauce, or in this case the algorithm that makes them run. To better understand these algorithms, SEO specialists have had to try to reverse engineer them. It’s also important to understand that each engine runs different algorithms—for example, Bing runs a different algorithm than Google. Each engine’s algorithm is proprietary to that engine; in some cases, other engines may lease these algorithms (as Yahoo! now leases Bing’s algorithm), but each major algorithm will have its own quirks and issues to test against.

The best way to reverse engineer something such as a search algorithm is to look at data points, examining them to try to determine which return positive feedback and which return negative feedback. Analytics help take a lot of the guesswork out of the SEO’s job.

Search analytics is not just about measuring traffic delivered, but also about landing page optimization (LPO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO). LPO is focused on retaining and moving people through your site; it acknowledges that not everyone comes to your site through the home page. You typically start by optimizing your highvolume entry pages and work down from there. CRO is focused on moving people through a funnel to a goal. This conversion may occur over several visits as part of the overall life cycle and decision-making process of purchasing a product. CRO takes into account the stages of this process and the needs of a user to help that user make a decision as quickly as possible.

A search strategy is not concerned simply with delivering traffic to a site; it must take into consideration the handoff of that traffic, as well as the pathing of that traffic to each goal and objective. Site search also helps facilitate the measurement of on-site navigation issues and needs. Think about moving beyond measuring traffic volume, and measuring business objectives and goals. Think about measuring to improve those objectives and goals.

Source of Information : MASTERING SEARCH ANALYTICS MEASURING SEO, SEM AND SITE SEARCH

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Successful search campaigns are won by those who know where they are weak and where they are strong. To be a winner in search, you need to have a solid metrics foundation. There isn’t any magic solution or formula; it comes down to measuring, testing, analyzing, and interpreting data. If you want to improve your search campaigns, you will need to exhaust all the data you have, beginning with the data closest to the user or customer and then expanding out.

Fix and improve what you can control first (your website and the customer experience), then try to fix the larger issues (competing and moving up the rankings by building more links for competitive words). A good approach to working with data is to look at data about the user (words and searches bringing them to your site), data throughout your site (what they are doing on your site), and off-site data (influence over offline actions such as buying a product in a store), and then to tie all of this back to data from the search engine (determining whether the engines are interpreting your site’s content as you feel it should be interpreted). The success of your search campaigns depends on recognizing that you have access to user behavior as well as user intent. The engines try to understand user intent in order to provide the best experience possible and pass this along every time a user comes to your website through the referring URL. Knowing the users’ intent should help us shape our entry points, as well as the overall experience that people have when engaging with our sites.

Search—be it SEO, SEM, or site search—is a very simple concept. The search engine’s goal is to deliver the right content to the right person in the right place and at the right time. The engines are always looking to perfect this. The question is, how do you know if your business is a winner?

Source of Information : MASTERING SEARCH ANALYTICS MEASURING SEO, SEM AND SITE SEARCH

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