360DigitalInfluence

Search Engine Strategies (SES) is one of my favorite industry conference series, bringing together some of the smartest minds in search as well as tens of thousands of attendees each year.

The SES Chicago event is kicking off one week from today - on Monday, December 8th. Thanks to the help of folks at SES Chicago, I had an opportunity to  create a “SES Chicago Interview Series” with three panelists who’ll be  participating in the social media or measurement-focused panels.  Today, I’m posting my Q&A with Google’s Kristen Nomura who will be participating in a  session on  ”Measuring Success in a 2.0 World.”  If you’re still considering attending, here are a few great posts worth checking out:

SES Chicago 2008 Invitation and Primer
4 Reasons to Go to SES Chicago
Interview: Bruce Clay on SEO Tools
SES Chicago to Spark Discussions on Viral Campaigns, Social Media and Search around the World

Stay tuned later this week for my interviews with Pauline Ores of IBM and Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink.

KRISTEN NOMURA
Central Region Manager, Search & Analytics
Google

Q: You are participating in the “Measuring Success in a 2.0 World” session on Day One of SES Chicago. With so much focus on measurement and outcomes given the current economy, this is sure to be a popular session. Can you give us a sneak, high-level preview of what you’ll be sharing?

A:   There are five speakers on the panel, so we each have just eight minutes to present before the Q&A session – not much time! Since the attendees of SES are already experts in driving visitors to their sites via search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising, I plan to focus on measuring what visitors do post-click.

I don’t know if we’ll have time to go in-depth on visitor segmentation, but this is one area we’ve been exploring with our clients since the launch of Advanced Segmentation in Google Analytics last month. The fantastic thing about search traffic is that the phrases people use to get to your site can be a great window into visitor intent. It takes a bit of work upfront, but if you really mine the search query data to understand the needs of your visitors, you can start to pinpoint which segments you are serving well, and which ones you are ignoring or under-serving.

Q: What advice would you give a blogger who wants to get smarter about how they measure success against their efforts?

A: The first and most obvious metric is the number of readers your blog attracts. This should be a combination of those who come to the blog and read your content, and those who subscribe via RSS.

The next consideration is reader loyalty. Do they come once and never return? Or do they come back on a regular basis to check out your latest words of wisdom? For this metric, you can simply look at your site analytics and see what portion of each month’s visitors are new vs. returning visitors, or look at visitor loyalty reporting to see how often in a particular time period they’ve come to your blog..

Another critical measure of engagement is how frequently your readers are posting comments. You should aim to grow your comment-to-post ratio over time as a measurement of audience participation. As readers comment, you as the blogger can encourage more dialogue by actively responding to their comments – the conversation should not be just one-way.

Finally, you should look at how much other bloggers are talking about you. Trackbacks to your blog are an excellent indicator of your authority on a topic, and may also lead new readers to discover your content.  

These are just a few high-level ideas for measuring a blog’s success. Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, is an avid blogger and wrote a very comprehensive post on this topic a while back. I’d encourage anybody interested in metrics for blogs to check it out.

Q: If you were to define a key trend that will shape how we measure success over the next year, what will it be?

A: With the economy in a recession, I think the trend will be less about new ways of measurement, and more about making measurement and testing a higher priority.

Advertisers and agencies are being asked to justify their budgets, so I predict we will see budgets shift towards the most quantifiable channels, and towards those that capture prospects who are farthest along in the purchase funnel. Marketers will try to tap their loyal customer base for better efficiency; meanwhile, top-of- the-funnel, awareness-driven efforts will become a lower priority for many.

The upside of this situation is that scarcity breeds creativity. In 2009 I hope to see more advertisers focus on making their websites and marketing efforts more effective through testing and experimentation. Working with Fortune 500 companies in many industries, I have been surprised how few have embraced multivariate or A/B testing, but now is the perfect time to start because even a small percent change in conversion can really boost return on ad spend.  

Through experiments using Google Website Optimizer, we’ve found that seemingly minor changes to a landing page or checkout process can significantly increase conversions. There are several tools out there to assist with multivariate testing, but Website Optimizer is free, so there’s no cost barrier to using it. What better way to make your marketing budget go further?