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Being a Web Analyst I feel compelled to attend sessions at Search Engine Strategies conference that cover Web Analytics and that's what I'm doing today. The first session - Web Analytics & Measuring Success had some very good information in it and the large room was packed - which is a good sign that more and more people who attend Search Engine Strategies want to know more about Web Analytics.

Here's the marketing notes which I'll follow with my own notes and thoughts:

How do you know if you've been successful with search engines? You can check your "rank" at search engines for particular keywords, analyze log files to see the actual terms people used to reach your web site or make the ultimate jump and "close the loop" by measuring sales conversions and return-on-investment (ROI). This panel explores ways to measure success and what statistics you should really care about.

Moderator:
Allan Dick, General Manager, Vintage Tub & Bath
Speakers:
Laura Thieme, President and Founder, Bizresearch
Stacy Williams, Managing Partner, Prominent Placement, Inc.
Q&A Speakers:
Akin Arikan, Sr. Product Manager, Unica Corporation - Web Analytics Group
John Marshall, CEO, ClickTracks.com
Chris Knoch, Principal Consultant, Omniture, Inc.
Brett Crosby, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics, Google, Inc
Barry Parshall, Director of Product Management, WebTrends Inc.

Here's my notes:

Laura Thieme: Analytic tools have a problem in that you have jump around a lot to get all the information that you want (note: some tools like ClickTracks try to solve some of the usability problems by making the interface more visual). Funnel reports show which pages are getting forms filled out more often.

People will often click on page links that suggest some kind of gain or reward. For example: Top exits on our main page for Vanessa Fox's new blog because people think they're getting sex (but she works at Google and her blog is about Google Webmaster Central and has no pictures).

Also, blogging will affect the demographics of who will come to the site. (NOTE...this is not so far off from inviting people to post who represent the demographics you want to reach).

Web analytics is extremely time consuming and your time and skill set are different than seo.. Ha, that's an understatement - Web Analytics is hard - if you really do it well, it's an Art.

Stacy Williams: I'm a Marketer at heart, pure marketing. Why measure? Web analytics is the back end to prove your web strategy works.

What your KPI's are depends on what type of business you are.

What do you want to know? Don't let existing data influence what you measure and don't get caught up trying to figure out what your competitors are doing (you might be copying their mistakes).

Schedule a time to look at reports. We also maintain some sort of diary that allows to track metrics over time.

Atlanta Children's Shelter case study.
1. We Make site seo friendly
2. Look at site logs and found some basic types of terms (homelessness,
volunteering, etc)
3. We looked at basic analytic data show changes as our efforts took shape..and metric affects another).
4. Take a long term view, don't get caught up with daily, weekly, monthly changes.
5.look at bounce rate, for our site it was 61% and we were alarmed and found that our firm was coming up for Atlanta Marketing Firm when we are as SEO firm..so people are coming for the wrong terms. You can't make your firm invisible for terms your not targeting.
6. You can't control Sessional traffic peaks and dips.
7. Take information and turn it into insight. (note: that's what I do).

And that's it for this session. My take:
It's totally possible for me to do much more with keyword traffic logs, especially the "Long Tail" traffic that comes to most sites - to find out why people are looking at a site. The session inspired me to take another look at some of my clients who I have access for this kind of information.

Second, it's possible to look at the traffic coming to any page, or any blog post using tools like KeywordMax or Google Analytics (or any number of Analytics Packages) and see if the keywords match closely what the page is actually about. If keyword traffic that comes to your page is largely mismatched to what's on it - you can be sure the visitor's experience is going to be poor and they will soon leave your site, probably never to return.