SEMpdx – Web Analytics Edition
Posted on: November 12, 2008 by Syzlak Comments
Last night was all about Google Analytics. Which was well timed, as Google Analytics has started juicing and created a well rounded, robust, analytics package.
This SEMpdx Hot Seat’s (btw – did you guys realize that SEMpdx is really annoying to pluralize or add possessiveness to? SEMpdxes? SEMpdx’s? Just really annoying.) featured guests were Eric Peterson and Ian Lurie. Enough with this semi-formal writing…
6:10pm – Mirror Pond
Eric Peterson is giving a high level introduction to the wonders of GA 3.0. Highlights include:
- Custom Reporting
- Advanced Segmentation
- API Access (will allow integration of analytics into proprietary reporting and data collection ZOMG this is so awesome!!!! OMG OMG ESPN BBQ IMHO – this will cut down reporting time by … some large percentage!!!!)
Eric’s slick, but he didn’t speak long. I think he’s going to be more interesting when we get to the Hot Seat.
6:20pm – Same Mirror Pond
Lurie time. Ian’s got a presentation on segmentation. Ian does a great job of introducing the topic and showing a real world example. He used the latest fad of charging a fee on airline luggage. I’m going to use a different, more Web relevant example. Audience Segmentation is essentially treating visitors as tags. On a blog, or bookmarking site, we use tags to identify where a post, link, etc. belongs. We are able to divide and group at the same time. Take my delicious bookmarks. I have a bunch of music venues as I am a musician. So how do I organize them? For me, the most important facts about the sites were as follows:
- What is it? (A Venue)
- What type? (A Bar)
- Location? (Portland)
- Sounds they like? (Alternative)
- Have we played there before? (No
)
Now that I have assigned one site all of these attributes (and more), I can easily index them by just looking up the city, or the sound, etc. Plus, I can find a coffee house in Corvallis that likes acoustic songwriters very quickly. Well, audience segmentation does a similar thing. Simply setup your own parameters for your web analytics:
- Visitors
- From Google
- On the week of the 14th
- That viewed 4 pages
Bam.
Lurie made a good point about the value of segmentation too. Often times, people see PPC as an easy way to trim budgets. They also see that SEO is working well for them, and accounting for most of their sales. So, right off, they start calling for PPC’s head. This is not always the case (thank you), sometimes site trends will be tied to PPC whereas SEO acts in a different manner and vice versa. Sometimes, SEO traffic will be converting for your top 5 keywords at a rate that is astronomically better than PPC. However, PPC is converting for your bottom 550 keywords at astronomical rates. Unfortunately, too many people focus on the former rather than the latter.
6:30pm – time for the bathroom. At the door, I hear the all too familiar battle cry of the wounded alcoholic – “ack..hag…whack.” That man is puking. In the Hotel deLuxe lobby. On a Tuesday. At 6:31pm. I love this country.
6:34pm – Mirror Pond
When I returned, Eric Peterson had said one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard someone who is not me say about the state of the market and advertising at this moment.
Don’t turn off any marketing if you don’t know what it is
Lurie followed up by saying that it’s ok to run tests on things that you’re thinking about shutting down…but don’t shut it down.
Fun Facts:
- Unique Visitors are inconsistently inaccurate. Just use Visits.
- 7% of users delete cookies every day (really?)
- Bounce Rates, historically are the #visits to a single page/the #visits to said page
- With the new GA, you can define your own Bounce Rates
Then there were Hot Seats…they were good, and there was a lot of Analytics integration into the discussion, which was refreshing. I like when the Hot Seat is slightly different and not just 4 SEOs saying “uhhh…robots.txt…well, I guess John already covered that…oh! You should make a sitemap.xml file.” Last night was a good format, 2 SEOs, 2 Analytics. That being said, where was the PPC love?
