London SES – Deep Dive analytics – When Bounce Rate No Longer Floats Your Boat
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London SES – Deep Dive analytics – When Bounce Rate No Longer Floats Your Boat

22nd February 2011

Matt Bailey: Founder of Site Logic focused on missing pieces

Matt started by saying you need to establish how you are to be measured at the beginning of every project. Define how accountable you are to that. There may be things that are out of your control. Increased leads don’t necessarily mean increased profits so make sure you have an accurate picture.

Defining your lead value is vitally important and working out what it is based on is essential in the planning phase. If you are held accountable to the revenue generated you need to incorporate your analytics into a CRM and question the data that comes back from the CRM.

Ensure that you follow up after the conversion, you can increase the close rate from lead to sale by displaying better information on the lead confirmation page.

To unlock key potential you need to go past conversions and look at profits. Concentrate on profitable products and high margin products rather than caveman analytics which are the basic visits and conversions.

Define the potential value within the goals of your analytics and that helps define potential value and also helps the business concentrate where the opportunity is lost.

Brian Clifton: Founder of GA Experts – Measuring success within Social Media

The social media landscape includes forums, review sites, online games, social networks, file sharing. The major networks tend to be focused on but social media is far bigger than Twitter and Facebook.

Can we measure it?
We can measure all social media traffic but there are challenges to measuring it effectively. Onsite is easily measured through Google or Yahoo analytics but you don’t control what happens out of the realms of your site. Hitwise and Comscore can help measure offsite analytics. The offsite tools are disparate and you have lots of data in lots of different places. Comparing apples with apples is a challenging task.

The ultimate goal would be to incorporate it all into a single platform but it is a few years away. A more simplified process would be to use URL shorteners as they are far more trackable if you integrate them into Google analytics. If you use tracking parameters in the urls you can tag all social media traffic.

The three parameters you can use are:
• utm_source
• utm_medium
• utm_campaign

Integrate these into your social media campaign and you can get a granular picture of the traffic from the campaign. If you don’t do this you would just have the standard referrer data but you would miss the twitter application traffic which would come through as direct traffic and thus skew the reporting.

It also means you can aggregate campaign data across Facebook and Twitter in a single place and allow better granular analytics about the campaign as a whole.

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Written By
Louis Venter is the founding director and CEO of MediaVision, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) company specialising in all areas of search. His particular interests are organic search marketing, paid search marketing, conversion strategy and online PR.
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