Analytics and Search Behind the Scenes - Event Recap

After a weekend of music at South by Southwest, one would think Bill Leake may be a little off his game. Good thing for us, he wasn’t.

By 8am the main ballroom at The Depot was pretty full, which was a little surprising to me considering a lot of us are not morning people. I guess this whole Search and Web Analytics thing is finally catching on.  I mean, can you really have successful search (or any online marketing) campaign running without any sort of Web Analytics tied to it? From what Bill said, you really can’t.

The presentation started out with an outline of the basics and some general fundamentals to follow. At this point, I was really just nodding my head in agreement and happy that I’m on the right track with my own thought process. I also noticed a lot of the same thing going on throughout the ballroom. According to Bill, what it comes down to is this; we all know that it’s great to track our campaigns, but do we understand what we’re tracking and what our objective is? That objective is probably the most important aspect of tracking any campaign. Before we even start posting code all over our sites, we need to ask ourselves one simple question. Do we know what we need to get out of this?

Bill made a comment as he was rolling into the topic of testing and tracking that I liked enough to write down. “Measure twice, cut once”. We all know that any campaign should be tested before rolling out, but if you’re not tracking it then what’s the point? He talked about how you can, and should, try anything but you have to track it in order to understand the results. Gone are the days of throwing up some cool creative or a crazy offer out there and seeing what sticks. Agreed.

We all like case studies right? I mean, if someone else can do it, that means we can too. During the morning session, we heard about a B2B client who was spending $110K/month on their PPC campaign, which doesn’t seem too horrible to me. They were finally convinced to optimize their search campaign to find out which keywords were actually converting to sales. What a concept! In doing this, they dropped their overall monthly spend by 40%. Wouldn’t we all like to make our budgets drop by 40% and see more efficient results?

What it all really comes down to is that a lot of us are great with the creative, but not so great with the numbers. The excuses are endless… “Our technology can’t handle it”, “We don’t understand how to use the tool”, “It’s too expensive to set up”, yada, yada, yada. The point that Bill was trying to make, and that I hope we all understand now, is that we have to do the dirty work to get to the good work.

All in all, the session was definitely insightful and Bill kept me awake and at full attention for the 45 minutes he spoke. By the end of the presentation, I wasn’t just nodding my head in agreement; I was saying to myself “that’s a great idea”. I did write down one more quote that I thought was pretty funny with regard to testing. To quote Bill, we should all “put the frog in cold water and turn up the burner instead of throwing the frog directly in the warm water”.

Make sure you download the deck and the podcast when you get a chance.

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This entry was posted by Sara Chapman on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Interactive Marketing.
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