SES Chicago 2007 Day 1 Session 2: Meet the Web Analytics Players Vendors from major web analytics services each covered different metrics challenges plus answered questions about measuring success and their tools in general.
Moderator: Frank Watson, Head Search Marketing, FXCM: The industry has grown extremely fast over the last few years and if you’re not using it [modern analytics] you’re far behind the curve. Whether online or off, analytics are used to determine where the customer comes from, their behavior within content, and associated conversion. Speakers: Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Omniture, Inc. The traditional SEM conversion path is about impressions, clicks, and conversion. Adding modern analytics to the mix evolves the path to: impression, click, site interactions with content with content, and conversion. He discussed newer metrics available with the advent of modern analytics software.
The universal metrics are bounce rate (who leaves after 1 page), time on the site per visitor, page view per click, “metrics, analytics, “success events, or “KPIs” mean the same things.
Conventional Retail metrics include orders, revenue, conversion rate (orders / clicks), cost per order (cost / orders). Modern analytics afford additional metrics including. Average order value, visit yield, average retail, cart creations, cart conversion rate, cost per cart creation, checkouts, checkout conversion rage, cost per checkout, monthly unique visitors, average time on site, days since last visit, return visit frequency, advertising cluck rate, revenue per page, ad impressions, ad clickthroughs, and, subscriptions. Lead generation metrics are generally used for technology or b2b sites and include leads initiated, total leads completed, lead conversion ratio, lead completion ratio, and cost per lead. Financial vertical metrics include applications initiated, applications saved, applications completed, application value, and applications approved. Thomas Grant, Director - Internet Marketing Solutions, Unica Corporation: Marketing channels are evolving and are much more about an online/offline funnel than direct response to search. A huge amount of people convert offline.
Unica’s “Enterprise Marketing Management” approach uses software to deliver marketing process efficiencies, customer dialog precision, and accountability across all channels. The marketing system of record is a cycle: analyze, plan, design & product, execute, measure, and begin the process again.
Web analytics are a key component using KPI dashboards & reports, frictionless ad hoc analysis, granular, visitor level insight to drive profitable action.
Click fraud
Kristen Nomura, Sr. Account Manager, Google Analytics: Version 2.0 was launched in May 2007. It’s focused on making analytics to people at all different levels. The new dashboard report, allows for custom configuration of critical data and automatically emailing reports.
Recent announcement: Internal site search, event tracking, outbound link tracking without tags, new optional GA JavaScript, urchin 6 software now in beta.
Internal site search is the ability to learn what people search for within you site once visitors arrive. Reports will include: who search/when, what were they searching for, what page did they initiate the search from.
Event tracking for rich internet applications will solve the problems of using Flash, Ajax, and other media types which don’t usually show up in analytics. This feature will create “virtual page views.” These types of objects, actions, and labels will provide more insight.
Outbound link tracking (tagless) will help users understand what the exit destinations are. Google is creating a new JavaScript tag called ga.js which they are migrating to. It will be optional. Moving towards object oriented coding style. It’s faster, smaller source file and more readable for professional developers. It has auto-detection of server protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) which eliminates security-related issues. There’s faster download for non-secure pages. Most importantly, it’s the backbone for event tracking and outbound link tracking.
Urchin software version 6 from Google is in beta. The software will cost $2995 and will be free if you bought advanced support previously. You can apply what you paid for Urchin 5 towards version 6 and will be sold and supported through GAAC partners. It is notable that, while the session was called meet “THE” analytics players, a number of major analytics vendors were not represented. Marty Weintraub writes for aimClearBlog and is President of aimClear, a Duluth advertising agency specializing on organic / paid search along with social media marketing.
