Analytics & conversion
Search Engine Land is your source for analytics & conversion news and content. You’ll find a variety of up-to-date and authoritative resources, including the latest news, tactic-rich tutorials, and the latest data to help you work smarter and make better decisions.
What you read here is written by our experienced in-house team, and subject matter experts from leading brands and agencies.
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How To Estimate The Traffic Opportunity For Multinational Campaigns
Recently, I was asked to run an estimate of traffic opportunity for a multinational sports franchise in which I modeled their current global traffic against brand visibility growth opportunities. However, I also identified that to make the estimate relevant, I needed to quantify the traffic more than they had suggested. So, like all good Web […]
How To Determine Your Mobile & Geo Bid Multipliers For Enhanced Campaigns
As every search marketer should be aware by now, AdWords enhanced campaigns now allow you to set campaign-level bid multipliers for your mobile impressions, and also by geo. While mobile bid multipliers seem to be more of a step backward compared to mobile targeted campaigns, geo bid multipliers are actually a nice feature and definitely […]
How To Snag A Sale From A Simple ‘Contact Us’ Page
Getting website sales isn’t all about product pages and shopping carts. Many business owners forget there is a whole conversion funnel every visitor goes through before choosing whether or not to make a purchase on your site. One of the most important aspects of that funnel is the “Contact Us” information and page on your […]
How Enhanced Campaigns May Affect Your Analytics
You’re probably sick of hearing about it, but it’s true: enhanced campaigns are going to impact your ability to structure, segment, and optimize campaigns. Whether it’s in a positive or negative way is up for debate. Regardless, I hope you have done your research and understand the transition — how it affects you, your business […]
Drilling Into Top Conversion Paths For Valuable Insights
Getting the whole story from your analytics is always a work in progress. Not only do we need to look at user behaviors (or the lack thereof), we need to look at user experience interaction as well as revenues. One mistake I see many novice and new-to-analytics marketers fall into is ending their research path […]
Why You Should Give Some Of Your PPC Spend To A Conversion Optimizer
You may find the subject of this column a bit self-serving, since I am a conversion optimizer. Well, it is. But, I hope to provide some basic math that will support my claims. If you’re spending money on a pay-per-click campaign or spending someone else’s money on a pay-per-click campaign, you should give some of […]
How To Get Full Referral & Content URLs From Google Analytics
While cruising through the standard reports in Google Analytics (GA), you may have noticed that you can only get URIs (the part of the URL that follows the domain, AKA hostname). You can’t get the full URLs. That can be pretty unhelpful. So, I’m going to show you some tricks to pull full URLs into […]
A Guide To Understanding Big Testing & Massively Parallel Marketing
Last month’s column on Why Big Testing Will Be Bigger Than Big Data — encouraging marketing experimentation on a much broader scale than ever before — was well received. But one question came up several times in the comments: how do you enable many marketers in an organization to run experiments at the same time […]
How To Use Regression Analysis To Estimate Incremental Revenue Opportunities
My previous article was about estimating the potential for growth for those paid search campaigns capped due to insufficient budget. This was definitely the easy part since the logic behind the assumptions involved in the calculation was fairly simple. Now, we can address those paid search campaigns capped due to insufficient rank – and there […]
How To Get Analytics Right With PLAs
More so than any other product in the AdWords suite, managing, reporting on, and making sense out of Product Listing Ads (PLAs) extends beyond the toolsets provided in AdWords. The levers that we can push and pull exist within two unique systems — AdWords and Merchant Center — and, as a result, we need to […]
Google Analytics Rolls Out Solutions Gallery
The quest for the right Google Analytics dashboard, custom report or advanced segment generally begins with a problem that you cannot solve. Until now, you searched for others with your same problem and hoped they shared the solution in a blog post so you didn’t have to figure it out all by yourself. While there’s real value […]
TEES Your Visitors For Higher Conversion Rates
We model our online prospects with a number of different funnels, paths, flows and journeys. There is the classic AIDA sales funnel (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). There is the Brad Geddes search funnel (Awareness, Interest, Learn, Shop, Buy). Joseph Jaffe Flipped the Funnel. Dave Evans added the social cloud to the funnel. For me, it […]
A Foolproof Approach To Writing Complex Excel Formulas
There comes a time in a marketer’s life when making pretty charts with a predefined dataset just doesn’t cut it. And finding the sum and average of a column of data just doesn’t satisfy you anymore. Eventually — and it’s really inevitable — you will actually have to dive deep into the data and cull […]
Why Big Testing Will Be Bigger Than Big Data
Big data is a big topic these days, one that has made its way up to the C-suite. The CMO may not yet fully understand what big data is, exactly. But the CMO knows he or she needs a plan for how to use it. In fact, three of IDC’s Top 10 predictions for CMOs […]
How To Estimate Incremental Revenue Opportunities With Impression Share Data
When looking for opportunities for growth, most search marketers try to find ways to estimate how much they can scale up their paid search effort, and what would be the impact on ad spend, revenue volume, and efficiency. There are lots of different ways to go about this – one way I’d like to cover […]
11 Simple Conversion Strategies Many Product Pages Fail To Incorporate
Every e-commerce operation relies on the ability of its website to sell their products. Without the ability to have salespeople roaming the floor asking customers, May I help you?, businesses rely on the their website to sell, sell, sell. Many business owners rely on content to push the customer through the sales process. There is no […]
Analytics For The New Social Media Manager
I have been astounded at the number of social media jobs brands large and small have created over the last year. With each month, more brands realize that Social media isn’t an afterthought; it’s something that takes time, strategy, attention and even aggression to keep ahead of the pack. With all of these new positions come a […]
Can TV Advertising Really Impact Search Performance?
It’s relatively easy to report what happened in an ad campaign, but much more difficult to understand why things happen. Visits or conversions might go up or down, but why? It could be some form of seasonality or maybe your latest review hit the front page of Reddit. The mysteries of consumer behavior like to […]
Winning The Conversion But Losing The War
I’m writing this from a cruise ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (well, actually, about 500 yards from Cabo San Lucas). This is my first cruise, and it’s been an interesting experience. My expectation was that this would be an all-inclusive vacation on water; the reality has been somewhere between a crass timeshare […]
Analytics Matched Search Queries Vs. AdWords Keyword Details Report
A question recently came across my desk regarding the use of the Matched Search Queries Report in Analytics when compared to the Keyword Details Report in AdWords. The inquirer was interested in the benefits or drawbacks to both reports, also asking if they were interchangeable. I figured this was a great question to answer in […]
If Your Landing Page Could Talk, What Would It Say?
I am a landing page. My job is to greet you when you click on ads, email links and social media posts. You will find me by scanning a QR code. You come to me because you want something. You have requested my presence on your screen by taking a very specific action, and you […]
Advanced Filters: Excel’s Amazing Alternative To Regex
One thing I’ve never understood about Excel is why it doesn’t support regular expressions (which the cool kids call regex). Regex allows you to do advanced sorting and filtering. The SeoTools plugin for Excel supports regex, but it — like most cool resources for Excel — is PC-swim only. For those of us red-headed stepchildren Mac […]
Reporting Multinational SEO Performance: Difficulties & Insights
Whether you report on just two or twenty different regions, getting a centralised report on search engine result page performance by region can be a headache if you don’t have an easy — and scalable — reporting system in place. There are lots of ways to tackle the problem, but by far the easiest is […]
What Search & Conversion Articles Clicked With You?
As we jump headfirst into 2013, we’re still spending some time looking back at what Search Engine Land readers enjoyed the most so that we can set the bar even higher in the coming year. In the Search & Conversion column, landing pages, persuasive content and searcher behavior take top priority. In case you missed […]
Search & Analytics Year In Review
As we head into the holidays, we’re looking back at our own metrics for top posts of the year, and we wanted to share a recap of the most read stories in several categories on Search Engine Land. In the Search & Analytics column, our experts cover everything from the basic installation of tracking codes […]
A/B Testing From Search To Conversion
As I mentioned in a previous post, search marketers should work on finding the middle ground between a high CTR (appealing ads) and a high conversion rate (qualified traffic). This process is trickier than it seems because of the inverse relationship between those two metrics. In this article, I’ll share a couple of thoughts which […]
7 Secrets For Dealing With Quality Score
I’m back to writing my own controversial thoughts this month; although, if you didn’t check out the interview I did last month with Andrew Goodman and Matt van Wagner, you should, those are smart guys. Since I was thinking about PPC and how incredibly mixed up and difficult it has become, it seemed like a […]
The Value Proposition Test: What Is Your Page’s Caption?
There is nothing more important to your search success than your value proposition. Go ahead. Click away. I know you probably don’t spend much of your time on such things. It’s all keywords and copy, copy and keywords. Yet, keywords and ad copy only get you so far. For your visitors, these answer the question, why am […]
Reporting On Social Media Engagement
I was in this industry when people were starting to throw around the phrase Web 2.0. Video marketing was in its infancy, Facebook was only for college students, and MySpace was where you sold things to a 12-year-old. Along with my time in the industry, social media has grown from a conversation we had with […]
How To Make Google Analytics Talk To Excel, In Plain English
I’m spoiled now. I rarely go into the Google Analytics (GA) interface anymore. You know why? There are cool Excel plugins that will pull your data right into Excel. Of course, most of them are PC-swim only. Sorry, Mac users. I’m going to be testing out the only one I know of for Mac, but […]
Why Your Content Marketing Needs To Be More Active
The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs recently released their 2013 benchmarks on B2B content marketing. Reading it, you will be struck by two realizations: Content marketing is huge Content marketing desperately needs conversion optimization The “huge” part you probably already suspected from the deluge of blog posts out there on the subject. However, this report […]
Using Time To Stop Undervaluing Channel Performance
Standard channel performance analysis makes the assumption that a click from all channels behaves the same way. Picture your weekly performance report – in a given week you observe x clicks and y conversions coming from a given channel (eg PPC, Organic search, Display, Remarketing Facebook, etc). If one channel looks better than the others […]
How To Gather Evidence To Help Determine If It’s Time For A Mobile Website
Is t time for a mobile website? I was talking to some clients a few weeks ago and in separate conversations, both asked me if it was time for a mobile website. Their current websites rendered okay on a smartphone, but they noticed a lack of conversions for mobile users, as well as a high bounce […]
4 Anti-Science Marketing Attitudes That Keep Us In The Stone Ages
Are we hiding from science? As I write this, we have all let our breath out having learned the outcome of a presidential election and countless congressional races. Now that the task of getting elected is behind us, it is time to examine a bastion of political debate: bashing science. Shawn Lawrence Otto writing in […]
Study: 39% Of Google Search Referrers Now “Not Provided”
It is just over a year since Google began encrypting search by default for signed-in users. A new study finds that as a result, 39% search-related traffic from Google to web sites now has search terms withheld. Optify conducted a study over eleven months with 424 web sites, involving 17,143,603 visits and 7,241,093 referring keywords, to see […]
A Look At Cross-Domain Search & Conversion
If you are running multiple online marketing programs across multiple websites/domains, then you might have asked yourself the following questions. Are there any interactions between my websites? Are my customers likely to convert across multiple domains? Would those insights potentially alter my customers’ LTV (life-time value) and my goals, as a result? Cross-Domain Clicks & […]
How To Use Macros You Find Online In 6 Easy Steps
Have you ever done a search to find out how to do something in Excel, just to find the search results littered with macro options? I used to avoid those results like the plague because I found macros (at least those beyond what I could create with the Macros Recorder) really intimidating. And I’m writing […]
Making The Case For Native Mobile Landing Pages
At SMX East in October 2012, I presented on mobile landing pages at the popular iConvert session. Given the surge of interest in mobile marketing, and in particular, mobile landing pages, I thought it would be a good time to cover some of the key points from that presentation here. Slideshare: The Quest for Awesome Mobile […]
14 Ideas To Utilize Custom Variables For Search & Social Tracking
Custom variables are one of the most (if not the most) powerful tools Google Analytics has to offer to better understand your audiences from search and social. Unfortunately, they’re also one of the most underrated and underused. So, if they’re so useful, why do so few sites utilize them? For the same reason that custom […]
Keys To Projecting Latent Value In Visitors
One of the most difficult and valuable exercises in quarterly planning is forecasting. Many companies require budgets to be set well in advance, and as a result, analysts often prepare conservative projections in order to remain cautious and not setup their marketing colleagues to under-deliver. The byproduct of conservative projections is more difficult forecasting mid […]