Search Engine Marketing: Be Careful of Your Own Data

197662 Resource 76407 1 1 1203361107713 1203386379264 Controlled Measuring Your Business Blog's Effectiveness -- Start With Your Business Objectives

There's a lot of controversy concerning the right way to measure your business blogging efforts; but few seem to start from a list of stated objectives.

Imagine a business blogsite that has a primary objective - to help existing customers with product support. One might argue that the the fewer the visitors to that site, the better. Or, the fewer comments, the better. In contrast, if your objective is to sell real estate, a business blog that has increasing numbers of [new] visitors is good; a falling number is bad.Unfortunately, most analytics tools are designed assuming one measurement axis; up is good, down is bad. So it's important to create and sustain a business blog measurement approach that fits the objectives of your business blog. <a title="SearchEngineWatch" href="http://searchenginewatch.com/" target="_blank">SearchEngineWatch</a> has a forum post by a member named "randfish" that exposes a number of <a title="SearchEngineWatch" href="http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3786" target="_blank">measurable SEO factors</a> that are relatively easy to find and sustain on a monthly basis. It's a pretty good list, but it should be further shaped to accomodate your specific business blogging objectives.DependenciesIt's important to note that most metrics are rarely based on independent variables; a good example is new prospect leads. But this is true about all aspects of search optimization - it's typically never one thing that achieves success or causes failure. Imagine a blogsite designed to expose your company's thought leadership and expertise in hopes of gathering new sales prospects through greater organic findability. Since organic search recommendations are based pages that can be recommended, it stands to reason that lots (and lots) of pages in the search index is one of many possible [important] measures worthy of tracking. A high incidence of page acceptability into the search index is good; a low number of pages in the search indices is bad. This seems to be a reasonable indicator of content indexability as a whole - indeed, the reason that smart companies websites avoid walling in their web sites with a Flash application on the root of the domain.Some people are reluctant about index footprint as a measure of achievement. Imagine you are competing with a company that has one page in the Google index, and your company has zero pages indexed. In this scenario, the number of pages certainly matters a great deal; your competitor is infinitely more likely to get a search recommendation than your company. You can set the stage for alternate scenarios, but one thing seems pretty clear -- the more pages indexed, the more likely prospects will find you when they search for that special page and discover it is your page. This is even more pronounced if your Internet marketing strategy includes a goal to get <a title="Wikipedia: The Long Tail" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail" target="_blank">long-tail</a> findability - the idea that many pages can produce just a few clicks from people that are hyper-qualified and truly interested in your company or your message.Prime ObjectiveBut the true measure of your business blogging initiative is not about index penetration or any single metric for that matter - it may be about sales, or it may be about customer satisfaction, but in any case, it will most definitely have dependencies. For example, there are many dependencies on sales; good sales people are just as important as the leads handed to them; leads are dependent upon traffic, and traffic is partially dependent upon search recommendations and possibility your entire online marketing strategy. It is the dependencies that we often overlook when measuring performance.ScenarioYour blogsite has relatively low traffic from organic search recommendations. Who (or what) is the problem? Before you can determine this, you need data and a good starting place is to ask a simple but fairly obvious question - "Is your content indexed?". It's reasonable to start with this question because if the content isn't indexed, it's not going to produce any recommendations. This is one of many dependencies that need to be isolated to determine where the problem exists given this scenario. Another dependency comes into focus where search referral traffic is good but conversions are low. Conversions depend on the visitors and why they happen to be on your site. If they arrived there from a search referral involving a query for an upcoming <a title="NASCAR" href="http://nascar.com/" target="_blank">NASCAR</a> race in your community, and you sell luxury sailing yachts, the conversion rate will be predictably low; aside from the fact that NASCAR fans are unlikely to be luxury yacht buyers (no disrespect intended - I'm a NASCAR fan), there's a fundamental disconnect between the published upcoming event and your line of business. Again - this is another small but important dependency on the performance of your blogsite. As such, one question useful for measuring success is "How are people presently finding my content? What search terms are they typing to arrive here?".Biased DataMany business people make a fundamental mistake with this question - they assume that the queries used to find their blogsite (or website) are the things that people care about most.  This is only partially true - the search queries being tracked in your analytics program are biased. They are already tilted in favor of what you've previously written about. If you sell real estate and you've written a lot of content about colorful geraniums and lots of people searching for colorful geraniums have found your blogsite, it doesn't mean that lots of people that want to buy real estate also want to read about colorful geraniums. It only proves that you have the ability to shape the types of visitors that land on your blogsite and your efforts have attracted people looking for information about colorful geraniums. This <a title="Search Engine Marketing: Be Careful of Your Own Data" href="http://activerain.com/blogsview/Search-Engine-Marketing-Be-Careful-of-Your-Own-Data?10090" target="_blank">story</a> about Jack and Jill, two real estate agents drives this point home pretty well.ApproachTo create a more scientific approach to your content strategy, consider working backwards from your objectives.<ul><li>State the objectives</li><li>State the dependencies on those objectives (i.e., what must happen for the stated objectives to be realized)</li><li>State the dependencies on the dependencies (i.e., at each dependent level, what criteria must exist for the plan to work)</li><li>Repeat the process until you've created a details dependency map</li></ul>The most important benefit in this approach is that you'll quickly realize lots of things are required to achieve the stated objectives and one very key dependency is the type of things you write about. Working through this exercise will help you shape your content while developing the ideal measurement dashboard. 9 application/xml false blog analytics business blog effectiveness business objectives measure measuring Search Engine Marketing: Be Careful of Your Own Data love data - it helps us understand how consumers behave. I've also made many references to Freakonomics - can 't stress the underlying issue of correlation versus causal variables. Here's a scenario that makes me laugh because people get it wrong so often and the bias is so obvious. http://activerain.com/blogsview/Search-Engine-Marketing-Be-Careful-of-Your-Own-Data?10090 ...the search queries being tracked in your analytics program are biased. They are already tilted in favor of what you've previously written about. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Dosware Team Internet Browser; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 $Admin 76.120.48.245 false true false false true 174050 false false true false false false true 201094 Resource 174050 173239 24 1207413343418 1207525749535 Controlled Metric

Hi -- When a measure becomes a goal it ceases to be a measure. -j 10 application/xml false Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 69.181.23.26 false true false false true 201268 Resource 174050 24 24 1207526122245 1207526122245 Controlled When a measure becomes a goal it ceases to be a measure.

Perhaps...

However, isn't it logically difficult to transform a goal into a measure? If dollars are a measure, I find it difficult to say that "dollars" are my goal. This is ambiguous and in this sense, I guess it does cease to be a measure because measures are unambiguous by definition. 10 application/xml false Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Dosware Team Internet Browser; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 bfrench 76.120.48.245 false true false false true 76407 blog blogsite/Blogsite/web