I will be speaking on June 4th at SMX advanced on SEO Analytics. Analytics Every SEO Needs To Know – It’s more than just rankings and traffic reports to measure the health of SEO efforts. This session focuses on analytics that SEOs should be considering.

Not surprisingly, I will initially focus on ROI for ecommerce sites, particularly the importance of configuring your internal systems to capture Lifetime Customer Value within your CRM system instead of leaving it to 3rd party tagging software.

I will also talk about Crawl frequency and index inclusion as well as some of the data hidden in Google Webmaster Central.

Does anyone have a metric you find useful that you are willing to give up or a tool that you recommend? All contributions will be duly credited.

IndexTools announced today that they have been acquired by Yahoo. IndexTools has been one of my favorite Analytics applications since last years Analytics Shootout. Not only did they show the best results of all the tools we studied, they were also among the easiest to configure and offered a robust range of custom reports.

What I love the most about IndexTools is that they are able to collect all of the data a site owner needs from the beginning, so adding additional metrics to your reports only required small changes in the report instead of starting the implementation process again.

No word yet on whether Yahoo! will be offering IndexTools free to site owners to compete with Google Analytics, but if they do I will be among the first to sign my clients up, because IndexTools flat out rocks!

Many SEM firms develop automated bid management systems and sell their clients on the benefits of propriety technology that claims to maximize ROI. They compound this fallacy by running in broad match and using the keyword insertion feature to run thousands or tens of thousands of keywords in a campaign that has a dozen generic text adds and perhaps as many landing pages. This approach drives hefty PPC management fees, but doesn’t deliver the results that a well managed campaign is capable of producing.

Search users are becoming more experienced every day and their behavior is changing to reflect that. While it is certainly nice to be able to afford the luxury of having the top ranked site in PPC, it isn’t necessary. What’s necessary is having highly targeted keywords that are grouped by intent and are paired with relevant creatives that match that intent.

Take a search for “calendar printing templates” on adwords. Ten ads appear for “calendar printing”, yet none of them mention templates in the title. Only one of the ten mentions templates in the creative and none of them take you to a template page.

An algorithmically managed campaign would start in the first position and gradually move further and further down, trying to find the ROI sweet spot, never recognizing that the problem was a disconnect between the keyword intent and the creative/landing page content. It may appear to be prohibitively expensive to advertise in the top slot to give away a free template, but a well managed campaign would match the intent of the searcher with the keyword, develop a targeted creative and generate tons of traffic to their template page while paying a low CPC in the right hand sidebar.

Brandt Dainow published his 2007 study of CTR versus position, analyzing 500,000 impressions with over 40,000 clicks from 2002 to 2006. His conclusion:

“In my view the world has moved on– there’s no need to bid for top positions any more, any first page position will do. What’s important is the words you place in the ad itself. at PPC, but the ones who exercise the most care and attention to detail.”

Stone Temple Consulting and Alchemist Media are seeking additional participants for their upcoming Comparative Analytics Study. They are going to be running six leading analytics platforms side-by-side so they can compare results.

• Omniture
• WebSideStory
• Indextools
• ClickTracks
• Webtrends
• Google Analytics

They are seeking B2B and B2C ecommerce sites that spend at least $10,000/month on PPC advertising. In order to put these systems to the test, they prefer companies with a sales cycle that frequently takes more than 1 visit, a range of latency and some repeat customers.

Participants in the Analytics project will receive the following benefits:

1. Data on how the various analytics packages performed on their site. This may help the participant better understand the best analytics vendor(s) for their needs.

2. Detailed analysis of your site metrics by veteran SEM consultants using a variety of analytic tools. Their efforts to normalize data across these tools may also help you better quantify your ROI and understand current analytic issues.

3. Credit and acknowledgment for participation in the project. While they cannot quantify the word of mouth benefits or guarantee a number of backlinks, they anticipate that this study will be widely discussed in the press, in the blogosphere and at conferences.

In order to conduct this study, they will need to analyze performance data outlined below. They recognize that this is sensitive and confidential information. The confidential specifics of your campaign are not pertinent to the study, and will not be published. What is important to study is the relative data, information such as the differences in conversion data between analytics vendors, for purposes of evaluating the performance of the vendors.

They will mask all specifics, such as keywords, products, campaigns, the categories that the campaigns relate to, etc. In order to guarantee participants that they do not reveal sensitive information, they will allow each the opportunity to review information prior to releasing results.

Here are the specific items they will attempt to compare:

1. Clicks by source, campaign (e.g. Google AdWords Ad Groups, Overture categories, and logical groupings of web pages for organic campaigns) and term (first touch)
2. All conversions captured during the study, regardless of source (including transaction ID, customer ID and amount for ecommerce site)
3. Conversion by source, campaign and term of first touch. Including transaction ID (and amount for ecommerce sites)
4. Latency for each transaction where latency is the time from first touch to conversion
5. Number of touch points prior to conversion
6. Last touch source (when the number of is touch points greater than 1)
7. Pre-conversion events (downloads, signups, etc., depending on the site)
8. Repeat sales by source, campaign, term and customer ID
9. A/B Testing scenarios where appropriate
10. Various other tests that will be designed to expose the strengths and weaknesses of the Analytics Vendors products.

Please contact Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting at eenge@stonetemple.com and Jonah Stein of Alchemist Media at jstein@alchemistmedia.com if you are interested in participating.