At the very least, we do offer log analysis for our legacy clients with which we can calculate ROI, but I'd say most of our clients have their own form of analytics: from Urchin to Site Catalyst to Hitbox and more.

From a company perspective, how do these search marketing firms justify their incomes? How do they prove to their clients the value of their services? Sure they could report on rankings on phrases - but do those rankings translate into traffic, and more importantly leads or sales?

And if you are measuring a PPC campaign the need for proper analytics becomes even more urgent. Sure you can use Yahoo! or Google numbers, but that only tells you what traffic has been sent and what the costs are, but again you can't tell how effective that traffic has been without proper analytics. If you're leads aren't converting then you are wasting your money in PPC. But without this type of analysis you will never know.

As I think of all my clients, and the analytics they use, I am surprised that other firms out either there don't track at all, or don't properly track this sort of essential information.

And it's not just a matter of analyzing ROI. These numbers can also help show you other things about your site such as errors generated from broken links, or missing images, and of course where users are leaving your site. All this information is extremely important to the site owner as it can help them identify not only the problems with the site, but also the barriers to conversion.

Think about it: No other form of marketing has had the availability of data like the web. TV advertisers can't directly measure conversions from their TV ads and neither can print or radio advertisers.

Even brick and mortar retailers can't effectively measure conversion rates. Sure they can assume and extrapolate from sales figures, but they can never be as accurate as web analytics.

Web analytics can tell you exactly how many people visited your site, exactly how many filled out that form and exactly how many people purchased. Some packages can even give you the purchase totals, so you can see how much each person is spending online, which you can then track back to the entry point (either organic or paid) and perform some true ROI analysis.

The best a brick and mortar retailer can do is understand the total dollars spent in their store and assume a conversion rate, thereby estimating the total traffic to the store. But again, this is only an assumption not based on fact.

But with web analytics we can know exactly how many people visited that store.

As I mentioned above - it is the same with other forms of advertising as well. Advertisers spend big bucks on print, TV, and radio ads assuming a reach. In other words, they know the circulation of the magazine or news paper, and they have a pretty good idea how many people listen to the radio station or watch the TV at a given time. And they hang their hopes that those numbers will be accurate.

But McDonalds can't tell you how many hamburgers it sold because the commercial was on NBC last night at 7:08 PM.

This is just basic analytics, we aren't even touching on the future of analytics. That is measuring the conversion on sites where the sale may take weeks or months to happen, and will involve multiple people (your typical B2B purchase). Current analytics are somewhat limited in that respect, but they are improving all the time.

Soon we will be able to measure these types of conversions, as well as better track not only the online conversions, but offline as well (such as a sale made through a call on a toll free number found on a website). As more and more technology becomes integrated into the web, these types of conversions will become easier to measure.

This will be when analytics become even more powerful than they are now. When they will be able to measure and count the multiple touch points that many websites employ. No longer does a conversion happen when one person enters a site, ads product to their cart, purchases it and leaves. Now, conversions can incorporate so much more - from browsing the site, to downloading information, to sharing that information with others who will also browse the site and more.

This is the true power of web analytics which apparently only - of us use. And that fact - that only - of the search marketers polled use analytics is scary to me.


Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

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