The online landscape is getting more complex. Speaking from a marketer’s perspective, there are more points of influence that can alter a buyer’s path. At the last Search Insider Summit, John Yi from Facebook introduced us to something he called Pinball Marketing. It’s an apt analogy for the new online reality. Read the rest of this article at The Results People blog.
We hosted a webinar on January 25, 2011, with presenters Chris Knoch and Kyle Grant. You can view the webinar online now. For the Flash-challenged crowd (iPad, iPhone), you can get the podcast version. Analytics and Reporting Webinar Chris set the stage by describing two main situations for direct marketing: 1. Unlimited Budget: Set target ROI/CPA and maximize order volume or revenue 2. Limited Budget: Spend entire budget at best possible ROI/CPA In both cases, there is a need to determine the “true” ROI. This can be particularly challenging in a situation where, for example, the sale started online but [...]
Google Analytics is a free, easy to implement web analytics solution with an intuitive interface. For good reason, it has gained tremendous popularity and widespread use. And yet, so many companies use a standard implementation of the Google Analytics and then ‘set it and forget it’. They fail to make the additional investment to really take advantage of the value that Google Analytics can offer in terms of identifying ways to acquire new customers and increase business with existing customers. Here are some things you may not have fully explored in getting the most out of this powerful tool: Google [...]
Bounce rate is a useful metric but can be misleading if not used in context We all know that bounce rate conveys vital information about site performance and can provide very useful clues about where to look for improvements. Especially since Avinash nominated it as ‘sexiest web metric ever‘ back in ’07. As is often the case with web metrics, though, the numbers shouldn’t just be taken at face value. Considered in the context of your site objectives, is a high bounce rate always a bad thing? Not necessarily. If people are getting the information they need from your blog [...]
There’s a huge variety of online marketing metrics for you to chose from. Many of them are either essentially useless (pageviews) or too granular to tell a real story on a site-wide level (bounce-rate). If you’re the CMO or VP of Marketing, what KPI’s do you really need to see so that you’re reasonably well informed about the performance of your organic search program against the half-dozen other channels you’re responsible for? I had a great question from a client this week wondering if they should move from 2 KPI’s to 3 for their high level dashboards. Hey Chris, quick [...]
That real time search is different from web search probably isn’t that surprising to you. But now we have the proof: Jim Jansen, a professor at Penn State and good friend of Enquiro, collected 6 months worth of real time search log data and is presenting the results at CHI 2010 this week. The Methodology Jim and his colleagues recorded real time search logs from Collecta from June to December 2009. This resulted in just over 1 million search queries that they analyzed at a term (individual words) and query (a string of two or more terms) level for frequency, [...]
Last week Google announced a new AdWords reporting feature called ‘Search Funnels’ that has been getting a lot of attention. At Enquiro, we were given a sneak preview of this new tool a few weeks ago and were able to use it with one of our major clients to get some more complete insight into paths that searchers are taking as they interact with advertising and the client’s site. This enabled us to generate some ideas for optimization based on data, rather than conjecture. So this increased visibility is most welcome! Some brief notes on Search Funnels: collection of 7 [...]
On March 18, there was a brief announcement on the Google Analytics Blog giving a “head’s up” on Google’s plan to release a browser plug-in that will allow web users to opt-out of Google Analytics tracking. Naturally, this sparked some vigorous commentary, with opinions ranging from ‘disaster‘ to ‘non-issue’. (Haven’t actually seen anybody – at least any internet marketers – suggesting it might be a GOOD thing.) Eric Peterson had probably the most complete coverage of the issue, with some astute observations regarding Google’s privacy motives being tied to their interest in collecting data from US federal government sites. My [...]
Recently had a client situation where we were providing the client with monthly organic visitor numbers to their ecommerce site. A colleague showed me a report received from the client, which had the same data, but marked as ‘visits’. So that got me thinking…what do they really want to measure here: visitors or visits? And do they know? And have they thought about what difference it makes? And, of course, what recommendation can we provide? Both numbers are important (although they may not be critical – depending on the outcomes you need to measure) and they provide similar information, but [...]
So we get a number of questions about attribution. What is attribution? Which attribution model should we be using? Is there an ideal attribution model? What is a typical attribution model look like? How accurate is one attribution model vs. another? Before I go on, I would like to say that I am by no means an expert on attribution. The purpose of this article is to really open up a dialogue and help take some of the confusion out of attribution as it pertains to marketing specifically online marketing. People have been trying to figure out attribution for years [...]