Featuring

Chris Sherman, a leading expert on the search industry, is a regular contributor at industry events and has a vast range of published work on this topic, including several books on search engines. Chris will be delivering this years Keynote speech.

Improve Your Conversions & Usability Through Testing & Analytics

By Brian Donohue, Senior Analyst, iQ Content

How much money do you spend on acquiring traffic for your web site?

No matter whether your spend is on online banner advertising, SEO, AdWords, email campaigns, or all of the above, you can probably answer this question quite quickly.

But which of these methods actually give you the greatest ROI?

That can be a trickier one to answer, as you might need to compile results from a variety of sources, but you've likely pulled together some meta-reports that tell you how many visits to your site result from the above activities.

But is ROI really measured simply by getting people to your site?

For the vast majority of sites, the answer is no. But what we've found is that our clients don't put nearly enough effort in actually tracking what their visitors -- who they've spent significant time and money getting to the site -- actually do on their website.

Key metric number 1: what's the bounce rate for your visitors?

How many visitors left your site as soon as they arrived? This can be a sobering statistic. And once you start looking here, you can find some critical pieces. For example, when looking at Google Analytics for one of our clients last week, we spotted that one page with a huge bounce rate was the 404 error page ("Page not found"). Why? Within a few clicks we could figure out that these visits were originating from an AdWords campaign that was sending visitors to a page that had been deleted from the site. It's no surprise people left as soon as they arrived at the site!

But web analytics isn't easy – it takes time and it takes experience to find the numbers that matter. But it's worth the effort, because good analytics help turn your organization into a data-driven one (we use this because we know it works), rather than a hunch-drive one (we this because it seems best).

Learn more about web analytics at the "Conversion Glory" session at Search Marketing World.

But a few brief talks will only get you so far. Get in depth-training on web analytics and web promotion (among other topics) at the iQ Content Boot Camp.

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