Below is live coverage of the Actionable PPC Insights From Analytics Data from the SMX East 2009 conference.
This coverage is provided by Sheara Wilensky of Promediacorp & Keri Morgret of Strike Models.
We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.
| Actionable PPC Insights From Analytics Data | (10/05/2009) |
| 10:51 | Keri Morgret: Welcome to the session, coverage will begin in a moment.
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| 10:52 | Keri Morgret: Rob Jackson of Latitude Group is up first. |
| 10:52 | Keri Morgret: He finds it surprising how many companies still have no idea about analytics. |
| 10:54 | Keri Morgret: Top tips for web analytics.
1. Get your setup right. E-commerce, scenario analysis, make sure all companies are talking to each other so you have everything covered in analytics.
2. Look beyond conversions. One problem is you can focus just on the last click and you're missing the keywords at the beginning of the purchase funnel.
3. Monitor your site performance. Run top content report, look at key pages in goal funnels, look for bottlenecks and what is stopping people from converting. |
| 10:55 | Keri Morgret: Conversion Attribution. No industry standard at the moment. It's like teenage sex -- everyone is talking about it but not nearly as many are doing it (quote from Avinash). |
| 10:56 | Keri Morgret: Top tips for Attribution.
Report with Last Click, but do analyze other weightings and share these with your clients. Look at some different attribution models. Keep it simple, you can get lost in way too much data.
Pull what doesn't work.
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| 10:56 | Sheara: First speaker is rob Jackson
Welcome to Actionable PPC Insights into Analytics Data
Our team is the conversion analytics team
We broke the team down into 4 levels
Tradioinal web analytics
Conversion attribution 0- analyzing the route to conversion
Website usability – what they did on the site, how they are interacting, what is causing them to drop off
Landing page optimization
Web Analytics:
- Over $1B industry in US by 2014
- - Growth area in digital marketing
- Some companies still not getting the basics right
- Despite being more imp due to recession
Top tips:
1. Get your setup right – ecommerce, goal funnels, test conversion
2. Look beyond just conversions – look at bounce rate and time on site
3. Monitor site performance – run top content report, goal conversion analysis
Conversion attribution:
- Go beyond the last click metric
- Pull what doesn’t work
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| 10:58 | Keri Morgret: Usability Software.
He likes to call it real-time customer research. Helping figure out what your customers are doing on the site, where they leave and insights as to why, heat maps, etc. Lots of insights you can get when you use the software. |
| 10:58 | Sheara: Usability Software:
-Real time customer research - have a look at what users are doing, where on the page are they going
-You know where, now see why.
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| 10:59 | Sheara: Tips:
1. Be proactive - have a look at what users are telling you
2. Segment if possible -cross reference session replay with analytics data |
| 11:00 | Sheara: Video example from last month: we are seeing a session replay to see where on the page users are engaging, you can see they are filling out the forms - forms are important bc if not easy to fill out, they will bounce. |
| 11:01 | Sheara: More tips:
1. Use data and not intuition!
2. Start over and repeat - continuous improvement yields better results than one-off tests. |
| 11:04 | Sheara: Next speaker: Alyssa Ruehl |
| 11:06 | Sheara: Advanced segments: Has anyone used filters? They are very easy to create. If you create a filter you can apply to past data. Here is a chart showing the paid traffic vs organic traffic (top content report). |
| 11:07 | Sheara: Google makes some reports easy for you, no reg expressions needed. It takes 20 seconds to do. |
| 11:07 | Sheara: You can apply advanced segments to any report - just for paid even, with a click of the button. |
| 11:07 | Sheara: You can segment by hour of the day, language, traffic sources, pages visited, etc. |
| 11:08 | Sheara: Play around and see what makes sense for you. You can have exact matches, greater than , less than, etc. Many diff segmentation possibilities. Day parting is one of my fave examples. If you are not doing it , mayn be something you should explore. |
| 11:09 | Sheara: Pay attention to your sample size when you are creating a segment. |
| 11:09 | Sheara: Compare conversion rates of a segment to that of your overall campaign. |
| 11:12 | Sheara: You can also use it to study geo-targeting decisions.
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| 11:15 | Sheara: For AB Testing: create a segment for each page version, and then run the report for each segment. If you have an ABC test, you can see how the segments operate individually etc.
So suddently your simple test results can give you a lot of additional metrics.
Some tips:
- Be aware of AND or OR segments
- test your segment size which will tell you if its worth looking at
- also you can compare up to 3 segments at once, you can compare multiple but can only see 3 at once
- don't tell how easy it was to do! |
| 11:19 | Sheara: I also wanted to get into tracking multiple attributions.
By default GA gives you last click attribution. Don't use nooverride.
You want to set your user-defined value, decide what to track, i.e. paid search vs organic.
Get a JavaScript person to help you code this.
You want to create a script that checks for previous cookies.
Create a custom report, show typical PPC tracking, conversions and user defined values, use excel to help split that up for you.
Is this the best way to do it? No, you have to do a lot of manual work, but it gives you more insight.
This will give you enough data to play with for a few months and then you can invest in a better way to do it.
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| 11:19 | Sheara: I also wanted to get into tracking multiple attributions.
By default GA gives you last click attribution. Don't use nooverride.
You want to set your user-defined value, decide what to track, i.e. paid search vs organic.
Get a JavaScript person to help you code this.
You want to create a script that checks for previous cookies.
Create a custom report, show typical PPC tracking, conversions and user defined values, use excel to help split that up for you.
Is this the best way to do it? No, you have to do a lot of manual work, but it gives you more insight. |
| 11:19 | Keri Morgret: Andrew Goodman, Founder and Principal, Page Zero Media is now up.
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| 11:20 | Keri Morgret: Paid Search Analytics: Who is Occam, and why are you using his razor? |
| 11:20 | Keri Morgret: He's going to cover some high-level ornery points he wants to make. |
| 11:21 | Keri Morgret: Andrew says he's going to trash SEO, since there are a few more PPC than SEO people in the room. =] |
| 11:22 | Keri Morgret: Occam's Razor -- take the simplest explanation when there are several possibilities. Avinash is the modern-day Occam. |
| 11:24 | Keri Morgret: He talks about a research paper called "Greedy bidding strategies for Keyword Auctions" written in 2007. |
| 11:26 | Keri Morgret: Easiest thing to do would be to set your CPA goal and bid to that goal.
There are parts of the paper that are out of date. One example is Google now has a CPA model when they did not at the time of publication. |
| 11:27 | Keri Morgret: The elephant in the room is that Google AdWords Conversion Optimizer is free, though more limited than other paid options out there. |
| 11:28 | Keri Morgret: For the client in this example, they got good results by going to a rules-based model and bid to CPA. |
| 11:29 | Keri Morgret: Downside is that Google's product is a black box, without us knowing much about the algorithm [isn't this the case with most things Google? km] |
| 11:29 | Keri Morgret: Analytics have to be useful, actionable, or even urgent. |
| 11:30 | Keri Morgret: There are lots of legacy quirks in Google Analytics. |
| 11:31 | Keri Morgret: We are more advanced these days, even on the default screens. |
| 11:32 | Keri Morgret: Don't forget about the analytics in the Google AdWords interface! This can tell you quality score, match types and other info that isn't in Google Analytics. |
| 11:34 | Keri Morgret: Quick small bash on SEOs. |
| 11:34 | Keri Morgret: Lots of things on the reporting tabs that are interesting. Content types like Parked Domains is helpful. |
| 11:35 | Keri Morgret: Sometimes some of the transparency with google goes away with newer versions of things. |
| 11:36 | Keri Morgret: No, we're not forgetting clickthrough rate. |
| 11:37 | Keri Morgret: If we manage to Cost Per Action, Google still loves the metric of CTR. |
| 11:37 | Keri Morgret: You want both high CTR and good ROI. Can be a "genetic freak" of an ad. |
| 11:38 | Keri Morgret: He's running over, so skipping through several slides. |
| 11:38 | Keri Morgret: He talks about how helpful the custom advanced segments can be. In this case, there was a long lag time (4-6 months) on getting conversion information. |
| 11:39 | Keri Morgret: They came up with some metrics that were likely to indicate if there'd be a conversion (high engagement in this case). |
| 11:40 | Keri Morgret: The new search query report in Google AdWords is great, it used to be something you had to download and analyze separately. |
| 11:41 | Sheara Wilensky: Our next speaker up is Wister Walcott of Marin Software. |
| 11:42 | Sheara Wilensky: We are a tool provider to professional search marketers. I will talk about 3 myths and the data behind them, and some techniques. |
| 11:42 | Sheara Wilensky: Myth #1: Google will pick the best creative for you. |
| 11:42 | Sheara Wilensky: Myth #2: Look at prior clicks for accurate bidding. |
| 11:43 | Sheara Wilensky: Myth #3: Portfolio Management is really really hard. |
| 11:43 | Where are you watching from?Not at the conference. At the conference, but not in this session. In the session In the session, came because of this coverage |
| 11:45 | Sheara Wilensky: So Myth #1 - You can show your creatives easily, or choose the one that makes the most money for Google. You want tp look back a couple weeks and see how it performs. Compare each creative in the ad group vs the average. If it's below average, its the loser so pause it, and if its near average, draw/not enough data. |
| 11:46 | Sheara Wilensky: Myth #2 - A lot of people will tell you they can help you track everything, but when you dig into the data you will see it doesnt actually make that much of a difference. |
| 11:47 | Sheara Wilensky: Example: we evaluated the path to purchase for a well known brand, in order to ensure proper credit to product keywords and we found that only 26% of paid search conversions had more than one click. 16% had 2 clicks, and 9% had more than 2 clicks. |
| 11:48 | Sheara Wilensky: People type the same term, hit the back button, and then click back in again. Google doesnt chage twice, but if you look at the Analytics logs, it will count it twice. |
| 11:48 | Sheara Wilensky: Group kws into categories to look for patterns. |
| 11:49 | Sheara Wilensky: Brand vs product etc. |
| 11:49 | Keri Morgret: [We're wondering where our viewers come from. If you could take our poll and let us know if you're watching and not attending the conference, if you're at the conference but not in the session (being at the hotel counts too), if you've been in the session the whole time, or if you came to this session after watching this coverage] |
| 11:51 | Sheara Wilensky: Now look at the conversion rate across the categories and the pattern of the first and second clicks across cateogories. We noticed that our product kws had a larger share than the brand after the first click. The result is a negligible impact in this case. |
| 11:51 | Sheara Wilensky: So this myth is busted for this particular client. |
| 11:52 | Sheara Wilensky: Myth #3 - Portfolio Management is reall really hard - i.e. want to target $10/lead. You are spending $7 per lead. You calculate bids on an individ kw basis, some kws are at the top of their auction. |
| 11:53 | Sheara Wilensky: So all things being equal, you put the kw bid at $1, so basically you are getting the kw at your target, which produces at $10 per lead. |
| 11:54 | Sheara Wilensky: So the technique we use is to chart the postion down the right side of the chart and across the top plot headroom and take the profitable terms across the top, take the extra $ you have available, and put that into the more competitive terms. |
| 11:56 | Sheara Wilensky: That's the end of my talk! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions. |
| 11:57 | Sheara Wilensky: 7 minutes left now for Q&A |
| 12:02 | 
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