April 9, 2013 – ISITE Design’s Ryan Summers and Amanda Bernard joined us Tuesday night to share their analytics expertise. It was an event jam-packed with tips on accurately measuring SEM and effectively interpreting analytics to surface key insights.
Ryan began by quickly reviewing several important elements for ROI including tracking codes, CRM, custom data source and universal analytics. From there, he dived in to some of the latest measurement strategies and tactics you can use to understand the results of your SEM efforts. One integral strategy is personalizing the site experience. Keywords, landing pages and other data will show you visitors who were interested in your product or service but didn’t buy anything. Based on the data you collect, you can then re-target to these visitors.
Three key areas where inaccuracy can come back to bite you are self referrals, non-qualified visitors (e.g. jobs, investors, internal) and conversions on 3rd party channels. The data is there, so take advantage of your analytics to prevent these mistakes.
Amanda walked us through a quantitative approach to building personas. The 3-phase process – research, consideration and decision – taps in to the expectations of your customers so you can determine the types of people coming to your site. Tools such as Yahoo Clues and Google Trends provide insights on how to keep site visitors more engaged.
Once you’ve built your personas, design your website accordingly. Implement, test and analyze for PPC landing pages and ad copy, home page re-design, and blog and social content. You should also review your persona-based site paths and evaluate specific content pieces by persona type.
Sarah is a search marketing consultant, helping clients improve ROI through paid search, SEO and social media initiatives. She is also the Official SEMpdx Event Blogger and can be found at all of the monthly events.