Professional SEO Specialist - janet bartoli roussos

Avinash Kaushik has some great analytics learnings - after just sitting in on a web analytics 1-day conference, I actually find Avinash’s blog more educational. I don’t mean to belittle the speaker, who had a pretty impressive analytics resume, but if your presenting information based on your expertise, you should probably appear at the very least enthusiastic about the topic or site some real life examples every now and again - and please do not read your PowerPoint slides - hell, I can read - tell me something I don’t know. Continue reading »

There are many web analytics packages to chose from. Lots of people have many opinions on various ‘best analytics” packages. For most large corporate sites, you need something robust and sophisticated. All have similar stats and reports. I have had very little experience using WebTrends. I had used a very basic version years ago.

I can tell you right off the bat this newer WebTrends Marketing Lab2 version is pretty smooth. I particularly like the “site overlay” nice feature, its similar to ClickTracks in that it shows you the number of users entering into specific areas of a page, this can be very helpful if you have an e-commerce site and a particular product you are trying to sell just isn’t selling, you may test different more visible areas on your page and find the right place your visitors are clicking. (You gotta like the visual in a world filled with numbers - at least I do).

Under the marketing area of the dashboard, you will find literally tons of options under search engines like:

Search Engines Dashboard

Search Engines with Keywords

Search Engines with Phrases

Search Phrases

Search Keywords

Acquisition by Search Engine (All)

Most Recent Searches by Entry Page (All)

Most Recent Organic Searches by Entry Page

Most Recent Paid Searches by Entry Page

Most Recent Search Phrases (All)

Most Recent Search Phrases (Organic)

Most Recent Search Phrases (Paid)

Most Recent Search Engines (All)

Most Recent Search Engines (Organic)

Most Recent Search Engines (Paid)

Ok, now all I have to do is start creating crazy reports all day. Create custom reports, with admin access - which is good this limits the amount of custom reports your company can listed. Otherwise you can have 20+ people with access and all kinds of reports all over. There are a variety of “dashboards” the marketing dashboard provides a quick overview of how effectively different methods, such as search engines and on-site ads, bring traffic to your site.

This is the primary area I will focus my concentration on, you can certainly get lost in the analytics labyrinth. As I become more proficient, I will certainly update any new findings to add to this review.

Anyone have any similar experience with WebTrends Marketing Lab2 Feel free to add your own uncensored opinion.

As one who manages several accounts. Tracking inbound referrals from search engines remain a viable, low-cost option for most organizations.There are the usual SEO metrics, such as:

• Uniques
• Page Views
• Time on site
• Conversions
• Percentage of search referrals against all inbounds
• Index saturation - or how many of your pages the engines have indexed.

All certainly serve a purpose but tracking results originating from each major engine, you’ll also be able to gain insight into unique aspects of search traffic such as which engine converts best for your specific products, or which engines drive the most overall traffic during various times of the year.

Be careful with overall traffic numbers, though. By digging deeper, you may learn that the engine sending you the most traffic is sending you traffic that does not make money, but consumes bandwidth and costs you money. Always dig to the next deeper level if you can.

And of course always test and re-test - and as obvious as this may sound if something isn’t working change it, then test again.

As I continue to read Avinash’s latest book I gain new insights and some good learnings.

Google recently launched its Google Analytics “lite” version of analytics for your YouTube videos.

Once logged into your YouTube account, you can view those videos you have uploaded and those statistics.

1. how often a video’s viewed in different geographic regions
2. how popular it is relative to all videos in a market over a period of time
3. how long until a video becomes popular (hmmm not sure about this one)
4. what happens to video views as popularity peaks

I oversee several clients who don’t or aren’t able to see those very granular results they’d like to see, so any more information than how many have viewed or comments for their videos is always a help.

Need a tool that doesn’t require an API or hundreds of dollars? Well besides Google Analytics (my personal favorite) our team just came across a site called sheerseo. This tool, which is free, has a number of cool and not so great features. The historical data is great. You can track within a graph how specific keywords are performing and quickly see your current ranking.

The not so great keyword density appears as well. If your new to SEO keyword density is not a great SEO factor - you should include keyword rich content in your pages, yes, but to measure what percentage your keywords should be from page to page - isn’t something to consider. The reason I mention this is because there are still those out there that think this is important. You could easily have 100 words on a page and if that page’s primary keyword is “family breakfast” all I have to do is ensure that keyword is included in the content 10-15 times and I have 10-15% of my content with my primary. Is that going to really help boost my rankings? Answer: No it wont. I have seen pages with just the title tag optimized do really well (albeit not for too long without the other major factors).

Give the free tool a shot and see how it works, or doesn’t for you. FYI: this is no Omniture, Hitbox or Google Analytics tool here. Just enjoy it for what it is and have some fun!