Leaving the cost of an analytics program aside, below are some of the things a Search Strategist should look for in order to become adept in SEO Analytics:

• Data separation by organic search: To be able to truly understand how well your SEO campaign is doing, the basics have to be there in order to properly separate out PPC data. This should be on a very detailed level so you can drilldown by keyword or page or any other major variable in order to know whether the whole campaign did well or just certain parts.
• Vertical abilities: As a Search Strategist who works on a multitude of clients, the program has to be able to provide data that is beneificial to those vast differences from an ecommerce client to a content provider. The reason is simply that the goals for each client will vary and thus the key indicators should vary as well.
• Usability: My time is valuable (or so I believe) and therefore I do not want to be sitting for five minutes waiting for the analytics program to pull one set of data; if the program is slow, I do not care how advanced the program is I can do more for my clients on my own. In this way I should not be digging around and clicking 30+ times just to get to what I need to look at.
• Export function: You cannot please everyone with whatever charts the analytics program displays and often times I find them rather ugly myself. Thus, I need to be able to pull some data and recreate the data in a nicer graph or take that data and merge it with external non-analytics data.
• Customization: The more customizable the program is, the more I will keep my attention to that analytics program. As I am interested from an Analytical SEO perspective, I will be coming up with new formulas and metrics that the creators of the analytics program will never think of. Restricting what I can do to a large degree means I will be looking else where to integrate all the data together in the long-term.
• Integrated Campaigns: SEO may be my main focus, yet more and more I need to know just how my work complements someone in PPC and other campaigns.
• Truly Integrated Campaigns: I want to move beyond correlations; that means I do not want to sit down and show the client that his revenue increased because of SEO + PPC, I want to show that it was due to having SEO, PPC, and a factor of SEO * PPC (yeah, econometrics!). Unfortunately, that means I the conversion event tracking through the whole person’s event, not just their last session-based event. Therefore analytics programs that focus solely on click-based sessions are going to be at a stong disadvantage in the long-run.
• Funnel Analysis: SEO has been very focused in the past on purely higher positions and lately more on driving traffic. I forsee conversion events and becoming a factor, but in order for that to matter heavily on my SEO campaigns, I need control over the layout of the pages organic searchers are coming through. Without a funnel analysis, there is no way for me to determine if I have relevant traffic but poor usability or vice versa beyond the bounce/exit rates.

When it comes down to it, I have only heard of Coremetrics having the ability to do all of the above functions quite well; that said until I get to try it out Google Analytics is probably the closest analytics program available to fitting within the above SEO Analytics requirements.

Now, what would be in a dream-world analytics program:

• Backlink analysis by page
• KW position trackings
• ROI analysis by keyword (this is here since paid links are violations of Google’s Guidelines and thus Search Strategists are not supposed to be able to do this then to any accurate degree)

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To really understand my viewpoint of how excited I am with analytics and integrating campaigns, the Coremetrics whitepaper (PDf) about their web analytics really started off amazingly. And just for the record, I’m rarely affected by various kinds of advertisements.

Here I was saying: “Yes! Exactly, you cannot get all that information properly in one area.”

Yet, I was expecting a great push towards the end of what it really meant–truly tracking an Integrated Campaign, where:

• SEO Conversion Rate: 2.5%
• PPC Conversion Rate: 3.4%
• EDM Conversion Rate: 1.5%
• Integrated (SEO, then PPC, then EDM) Rate 1: 0.5%
• Integrated (PPC, then SEO) Rate 2: 1.3%

But, sadly, Coremetrics really missed that great point–it beat around the bush in terms of truly analyzing a fully integrated campaign and instead ‘coyly’ noted the relationships and the information of the customer.

I know it’s a white paper, but man… I have to say that the white paper could definitely be beefed up to really tailor Coremetrics in an ability to truly compile the data and analyze a fully integrated campaign–now that in my opinion would put themselves far above the pack in a very public way as a web analytics company.

Then again, I have yet to fully try their product, so their whitepaper could conceivably be far off from what they actually can do.

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Google rolled out some new features for Google Analytics that are definitely interesting. Search Engine Land had the scoop on the new Google Analytics features:

Google Analytics has added three major features today, two of those features are related and the third is a standalone feature. Google Analytics users can now have the option of comparing their site’s data to industry benchmarks. Analytics users can opt-in or opt-out of the data sharing feature by logging into their Google Analytics console. The third new feature is the ability to see when your Google Audio ads run, in relation to your web site traffic.

The Google Audio ads data is definitely a plus and I going to love to see the data on any client that runs some future Google Radio ads! As for the other ‘two’, I’m hesitant on how many GA company users are actually going to share their data to make it worthwhile. That is admittedly a lot of sensitive data, but at the same time extremely interesting to see industry wide data. Still, how relevant will this data truly be when you could sign up hundreds of spam affiliates just to get the industry data you need and download it into a CSV and later compare that way…

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Google currently provides a very nice and free analytics program that does wonders in helping online marketers somewhat accurately analyze how their performance is doing (far better than TV Nielson ratings in my opinion or magazine trackings). That said, I’ve come across clients that refuse to use Google Analytics as they are afraid of Google potentially becoming their competitor and using the data within analytics against them. Kevin Gold at Search Marketing Standard (great magazine in my opinion by the way) feels that for the most part Google isn’t going to use its analytics for evil purposes:

[T]he other day I overheard a conversation about Google and how advertisers will not use their Analytics or Optimizer products because of the “big brother” fear. At other times, I have heard website owners claim that Google wiped out their business overnight through some diabolical plot to support other “preferred’ websites.

Who knows…certainly I suppose undercurrents lurk mysteriously in the unknowns…it seems to be happening in politics lately where bribes, influences and other pressures force less than ethical decisions. But I am not sure I believe the big brother fear or the other conspiracy theories. The bigger you get the greater level of scrutiny you receive from governmental and watch dog groups.

For me, I’ll happily use Google Analytics , Optimizer and any other quality product they launch to make my clients more and more money and leave the conspiracy theorists to their own beliefs.

I agree with Kevin on happily using Google Analytics, it truly is a great product (and Google Optimizer looks nice as well), but one always should (one would be very naive otherwise) keep a watchful eye on a powerful corporation (just like you would for the government or any powerful person) to see what they could possibly do with all that data.

Let’s take a look at some other examples in order to give an idea of how things could go wrong:

• UK ID card data loss: Accidental loss of data that could actually derail a compulsory ID in the UK.
• VA personal data loss: A second time upon which the VA loss valuable data on its people.
• Yahoo providing personal data of dissidents: Yahoo settled a lawsuit over providing dissident data to the Chinese government which resulted in arrests of pro-democratic protestors.

And yet, Google wants to expand further into online data storage?

It may seem like Google is the “Do No Evil” company at this point in time, but what comes of the day when there is new management? No longer is there a concern about the scrutiny as the new management may think it can get away with the data it has.

Oh, and just because a corporation or government is bigger does not mean it will be less likely to avoid trouble–otherwise the United Nations would be the cleanest government around the world.

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Demerzel’s bias: I work for an online advertising agency, I love working with Google Analytics, and I just plain love working with analytics data.

Found from Andrew Sullivan’s blog originally on The Guardian:

Web statistics are complicated at the best of times, and video throws up even more problems. If a site embeds a piece of YouTube video, for example, should that user or that view be credited to the host site or the site where the video lives? Once a download is on someone’s desktop, how does the broadcaster know if it is ever watched? And how can broadcasters best track on-screen advertising?

To make sure there is an understanding (and to clarify what I presume Jemima Kiss was referring to) web statistics in the form of stat counters is rather basic whereas web statistics in the form of web analytics (Google Analytics, Site Catalyst/Omniture, WebTrends, etc.) is complicated, but that does not mean that measuring data is any less valid due to its complexity. (more…)

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