It is very essential for a financial company to know, which user to target for what product and when. The goal of data analytics and data mining department is to arrive at accurate answers to these 3 questions, (Which User, What Product, When), trust me it is a rewarding exercise for the bank, users and definitely the analytics manager.

The problem is very simple. A customer may have purchased a single product or multiple products from a bank. The company would ideally like if all its customers bought all of its products. This possibility however does not exist, therefore without any targeting model; the company would be wasting money, time and resources by randomly targeting customers for its products.

Using a little sophistication of data mining techniques, we would be able to build a targeting model or a response model on customer base.  A response model is a predictive model which estimates the future behavior of a given customer even before it occurs. Even with a fair amount of accuracy it can be very useful for company in saving majority of costs in various departments/channels. There are various types of data available for analysis like demographic, behavioral, psychographic / attitudinal. The above data can be very useful in data mining methods, however the cost, usefulness and expertise to store / retrieve data has to be assessed and judged.

Giving an example: A customer has savings account in a bank, based on the information given to the bank along with account status and history, we could target her as a prospect for a personal loan product based on a logic / algorithm.

The logic / algorithm could be as simple as if a customer from metro with account balance of Rs 1,00,000 or more for over 6 months should be a prospect for home loans Rs 20,00,000 or personal loans over Rs 3,00,000. This is a simple example; however it could be a complicated neural network or logistic regression model.

Cross Sell Models: A customer of a product A, is a likely prospect for product B if his account activity positively predicts likelihood of purchase. Target model has to predict purchase of product B.

Up Sell Models: A customer can be targeted for higher segment product in the same category based on his account status and demographics. Normal saving accounts customers can be sold for Premium segments customers, if his account balance is over a period of time.

Deep Sell Models: A customer can be sold more of same product based on his need. Target model has to predict his need.

These target models are also called response models that only predict the purchase behavior of a customer for a given product. This model is ineffective as the cost of randomly targeting a customer for product is LESS THAN cost of targeting using predictive response model.

The main reason is because of below limitations of traditional response model

A)     All customers behave in two ways: Purchase or DO NOT Purchase

B)     Behavior of customers during absence of any marketing activity.

C)     Maximum lifetime value to be derived from customer is unkown, this will result in underselling or selling lower value products when higher products could have been sold.

IF these issues are taken care of by strong statistical modeling then loss making response model can be made profitable.

The original article was found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/, Copy rights are reserved.

Disclaimer: These are my personal views and not a view of any organization or body.

Internet Banking is a different arena of web analytics, which require a totally different perspective and problem solving capabilities. The rest of the article will talk about some problems and solutions in such areas.

In traditional ecommerce sites, KPIs and key metrics are tracked by setting up page-tracking and Goals. Users are tracked through funnel process, like movement from one page to another page until the sales confirmation page. Usability and productivity of the page is evaluated by bounce rate, exit rate, conversion rate and click stream behavior on each of these pages. 

However, consider a case of Internet Banking, it is very interesting that such funnel navigation or bounce rate gives a very little information about its effectiveness, here is why? Lets say a user has a bank account and is using Internet Banking for transaction.

There are various things are tracked to understand his behavior, a person who wants to transfer funds from one account to another will do it even if it is a difficult process and does not fully understand, a user will try and figure out the ways to understand process and transfer funds online. Therefore the drop out rate in funnel navigation is very less, unlike ecommerce sites. Most users will inevitable complete the funnel and navigate all important pages to reach thank you page, even if they do face difficulties. They would invariably figure out how to do a transaction online.

The problem for web analytics guy is, a lot of users seem to be using internet banking very well but how do you find out where exactly is the problem, what needs to be mended.

Here are some areas of data to be looked into, that gives us insights in this direction.

1)     Pageviews of Error pages.

a.      How many times error pages were thrown up?

b.      Source of error pages, which page led to error pages most and their ranking.

c.      Errors per transaction.

2)     Pageviews of help section and FAQs, which part of help section was most viewed and their ranking.

3)     Total Pageviews per page per transaction. Example, a fund transfer has 4 pages, how many times each of the pages were viewed per transaction.

4)     Offline feedback on errors and complaints on Internet banking transaction.

5)     Average time taken per page online

a.      Rank pages on average time per transaction

6)     Number of fraudulent transactions or security complaints.

These are my personal views and opinion on this subject. Please do let me know your views as comments.

This article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/ Copy right reserved on http://www.praveenkodur.com/

If a company has 1 million keywords in PPC account and is managed by 5 people then 2 Lakh keywords are managed per person!!.

This is a wrong strategy for growth. Google is spending billions of dollars to make life easier for advertiser, they are launching new features & tools regularly which gives more insights into the PPC accounts. There are lots of other companies which have launched various products around PPC management such as Betterppc’s Ad optimization, KeywordSpy, Compete Search Analytics, Shoemoney Tools and many more.

These tools along with the Google tools can greatly help reduce the PPC management process, time, and effort, increasing efficiency. Bigger accounts do not need as many people to manage. One single person can do the job of 20 people effectively, if the tools are used effectively.

PPC Management is like looking at stock market. A good investor is always looking at price of the stocks he has invested or stocker broker is looking at price of the all companies on regular basis. The difference is that in PPC you are spending money every day, while in stock you just buy once.

There are software’s available for keyword research, duplicate keyword identification, Keyword structuring many more.

With advance skills in Microsoft Excel along with the help of these tools can make life a lot simpler and easy with less work and less resources.

Google has launched Ad planer, upgraded the Google keyword tool by displaying numbers instead of relative graphs. The amount of time required to create a media plan or to come up with right set of keywords for PPC campaigns has been greatly reduced. Additionally Google has create a campaign library which contains a list of template which can be used to reproduce campaigns of the given order.

The ammunition and tools which Google offers now and in future will help make PPC Management easy, effective and less time consuming.

PPC managment requires daily changes to bids and/or keywords. But the point is let Google worry about making things easy for you in terms of managing PPC campaigns.

The Copyright of this Article is reserved by http://www.praveenkodur.com/

Traffic from Social media optimization can be tracked

1. Google Analytics Referral Traffic

2. Number of Friends who have added you in their friends list in each of your profile in each Social Networks.

3. Frequency of updates and quality of content posted.

4. Number of votes on your content and number of people who regularly vote on your content.

5. The Amount of content in each of your profile pages and community knowledge sharing page.

6. The Total Number of Links to and from these profile pages.

7. Number of comments and frequency. How many of them are not in your friends list.

The amount of effort that is needed to market on social networks is tracked

A Facebook or an Orkut application is like an small widget which is used by the Users of social network. Since this application interacts with lot of people, it also has the ability to interact with the external server. Google Analytics for applications can be embedded into the application giving all data w.r.t the users using the application. Developers will also get an idea about the extent to which the application was spammed by users.

Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com/analytics.php) and http://adonomics.com/ are service which is offered to developers of application to keep in touch with the traffic, demographic data, visitor data and conversion data.

These analytical tools in combination with customized tracking which you can set at application level which can send data to external server allows developers to track a lot of information about the user profiles and get useful information such as Traffic, Demographic Data, Profile Data etc.

This data has to be used to remodel and remake applications on Social Networks to make it more useful for users and make it more spam proof. A successful application can be built overtime by building more features to app based on the data, response derived from it.

Google gives details about creating a App;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/about/developer.html

There are 3 phases for Gadget promotion:

Create: Develop a gadget based on idea. Hire a developer for this or try out yourself. Thinking of an successful idea is Gold, however it happens by chance. Make sure it works on all kind of sites and all Browsers including remote ones like Safari.

Promote: This is the easiest and lest effort part, just add these in various webpages, sites. Give options to Add to iGoogle, My Yahoo etc.

Track and Optimize: This requires analytics and time. You must use Log file analysis tracking for analyzing the performance of visitor data, traffic data, demographic data, user quality data. Etc. For example your gadget is running on Orkut and Facebook. The number of users in facebook may be more than Orkut, but traffic from Facebook may not be of much use to your business. Then you must customize you App to favour more Orkut community users based on quality of profiles on Orkut. A popular web app can have an impact on Reputation Management and Brand on social networks apart from monetizable traffic.

This Article was originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/

The idea of this blog posts and future blog posts is to identify problems in web based business and how analytics can help solve it?

Blogging and Blogs

You have a small blog and spend considerable amount of time updating it, also have spent some money in creating and putting it up live. Measuring the success of a blog is not just pageviews, subscribers and unique visitors count.

ROI of a popular blog can be huge, if you have rich content and have active RSS subscribers. You don’t need a resume. Every popular blogger gets job offers regularly flowing into his email. Above this you have created a brand for yourself. This is a huge economical benefit considering the money and time you spend on make your blog active. If you have a great blog then you have separate brand and identity for yourself.

Small Scale Business Online

Concentrating on search engine marketing, seo, affiliate marketing to generate profitable visitors to site is fruitful. This is the cheapest form of advertising online. You have control over spends and will be able to monitor your ROI. Set up Google Analytics or any other analytics tool which will help you look at the visitor information.

Conversion University from google is very helpful in optimizing the website for higher conversions and sales (http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77123)

Small scale business must focus their marketing efforts cleverly around geo-locations to get maximum return from marketing & advertising. The site must clearly offer maximum benefit & response to their end users as promised in their USP. Most sites initially work on small set of customer base and keep them satisfied at all circumstances.

These companies are ecommerce sites, shopping sites, travel agent sites that are looking to sell products to their websites’ visitors. They should target at long term steady and consistent growth not looking to achieve instant traffic hoping to dramatically increase page-views and visitor count hoping make revenue quickly and grow faster.

Large Businesses Online

There are various large online website who advertise heavily online & offline for the purpose of promotion. The spend a big amount of money with an objective to increase visitors, page views hoping to increase brand value. It is unwise to spend money on marketing, advertising without looking at the actual value it adds to their users (customers).

Increase in page views and visitors may not proportionally be related to increase in revenue and profit. There are definitely smarter ways to reduce cost of marketing & advertising without impacting the bottomline.

I read about many large advertisers in US & worldwide who have decreased spends on search marketing as it has become unprofitable after a certain limit. They have found search engine optimization, social media marketing ways more effective to gain relevant traffic to their websites for increasing their sales.

Measuring ROI through every channel and making them profitable is very essential and must be the key factor

EXAMPLE:

The traffic to my blog has constant traffic from social media sites like stumbleupon and other social network sites. Few days it has huge spikes of about 2000 hits in a day from stumbleupon alone, totally free traffic.

Blog attracts about 16% of overall traffic from social media sites of which 48% contribution is from Stumbleupon alone.

The cost of promotion on stumbleupon is consuming few hours of time in writing rich useful content and building a network of bloggers, friends & general users. Comparing this with search marketing campaigns, same amount of traffic might have costed me few thousand dollars.

Never be afraid to use new format of media, content for promotions such as Videos, Apps, Images, podcast, audio files, flash files etc. It is just a new form of content by the underlining principle of promotion remains the same.

Reading:

Measuring ROI from SEO : http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625973

Measuring ROI from Social Media Marketing: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/measuring-the-roi-from-social-media-marketing.html
This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/

If you are good at link baiting then you should know want content to be distributed to attract audience.

• Use various content formats such as Videos, Images, Content for keep your community happy

• You can organize contests, puzzles, quizes for engaging the users.

• Understand & know your community group members, their preferences, geo location, profession, Interests.

• Mostly the mode of communication is Email, Scrap book(Message Boards) or Chat.

• Two main areas of management: Managing Content, Managing Users

• Advertise you community on Blogs, Social Media sites and even on PPC program works good. Nobody has tried advertising
  
  References:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/21/community.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/holy-mother-of-linkbait

http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communitytypes.htm

This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/

All rights reserved by http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/

Advantages:

1) Ability to target your Market segment

2) No Media costs

Method:

It is form of viral marketing technique, 3 Success Elements in SMO: Linkability, Visibility/Discoverability, Popularity

It is 50% what you do and 50% what your users do. What your users do will depend on how you build your relationship with your users. For example: By providing an easy access to submit your content on social media sites there is good chance your users will post it, if your content is worthy.Therefore the process of making your website social media complaint is known as social media optimization.

Key features of Social Media Sites:

A) Social Media sites have large number of users, therefore increasing the visibility of your website on these sites will surely have marketing benefits.

B) Social Media sites have lot of information such as user profile data which can be effectively used to rank users, or target a specific set of users for advertising.

C) Social Media sites have high user activity, due which fresh content upload happens at frequent intervals sometimes faster than News & PR sites.

D) Most social media sites has the ability to measure the quality of user generated content/users quantitatively and are transparent to general audience and search engines.

For example Digg gives details on how many diggs on content, who has dug, who has blogged about the content, what are their user profile data. All these details are transparent due to which the quality of the site, quality of users and quality of content can be measured both by users and search engines.Elaborating the points stated by Rohit Bhargava on social media optimization.

· Increase your linkability: Linkability is definitely the first step of optimization wherein users must be able to link to your rich content from other websites/blogs. Every successful website/ online business inherently is aware of this.

· Make tagging and bookmarking easy, submitting content easy: In short this means encourage to people to link to your website or post your content on other sites. As website owner you must encourage your users to link to your content and make the overall process of linking simpler, by few clicks.

· Reward inbound links: When you reward your users by giving a link to them in return of their link, you will encourage them to write more about you. This is very nicely practiced by Google blogs, you can find Google blogs(Adwords blog, Webmaster central blogs etc) linking to every blog who write about them. This encourages blog writers to write more about Google and their latest news.

· Help your content travel: This is another important optimization. If you allow your content travel, you are also generating backlinks wherever your content is published. RSS feeds are great example.

· Encourage the mashup: Mashup is simple algo in which inputs one or more content and outputs a new content using standard functions. Do you know the behavioral pattern of users who visit your website? Find out the behavioral profile of your users:

A) Are they tech savvy?

B) Are they first time internet users?

C) How many of them have a blog?

D) How many of them have Orkut profile, facebook profile?

E) What is their Internet Usage frequency?

F) How many of your website users, have a profile in social media sites?

A website like irctc.co.in may not currently need a social media optimization, but a website like rajshri.com definitely needs one currently. It also depends on how you want to grow as online business and which market segment you want to target in future.

1. Create Valuable and useful content, junk content can never be able to achieve the traffic, rankings you desire. The content must be useful for the users in your market segment, so that your attract quality traffic.

2. Help the social media users to post, rate and review your content.

3. Participate in relevant social media site, and network with people.

Types of Social Media Sites

Various types of social media sites are reviewed on SEO, Traffic, Ease of Optimization: For actively promotion and building your community high participation levels are required in each of the below sites.

1) Bookmarking Sites: Most bookmarking sites are open for crawling; hence getting as many pages in other users bookmark list is beneficial.

2) Social Media Content Rating Sites like Digg, reddit, propeller etc.: The work has to be done in building your network, friends’ circle that diggs your content, only way to attain top rankings is high level of participation in combination with posting high value content.

3) Image Sharing Sites: Upload images, tag effectively, form groups & networks for sharing and tagging.

4) Video Sharing Sites: Sites like Youtube.com, Dailymotion host videos as well allow users to post them on blogs, link to them etc. Additionally there are users viewing your video & posting comments on your video.

5) Social Networks such as Orkut, Facebook etc: Very little SEO value, as most sites are not open for search engine crawlers. Ideal for reputation management.

 

Social Media Optimization cannot be separated with Search Engine Optimization as SEO reaps significant benefits from SMO activities. Moving forward Social Media optimization will be the way to optimize sites, as sites will focus more on personalization, local and building relationship with niche audience.ROI of SMO activities is dependent on what you measure as success. If generating backlinks and ranking on search engines is success for you then you must invest in SMO activities for generating backlinks only.

The question is how do you measure success?

If you have a small website you can measure traffic and backlinks. For this you can set up Google analytics with e-commerce tracking and goal conversions. Look at traffic from referral sites and you can find traffic from social media sites. Also, you can find increase in rankings for top keywords on search engines.For more study on Social Media Optimization you could find these links useful:

• http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/introduction-to-social-media-optimization.html
• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060829-150053
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-optimization-13-rules-of-smo/3734/
• http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/08/new-rules-for-social-media-optimization/
• http://blog.seoptimise.com/2007/02/ultimate-social-media-optimization-list.html
• http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2006/08/5_rules_of_soci.html

This Article was originally found on praveenkodur.com Copyright 2008, All rights reserved by praveenkodur.com.

1. Emails Marketing campaigns with no referral tracking

2. SEO traffic has no referrals in some analytics tools

3. Traffic from Bookmarks.

4. A Viral Marketing Campaign

People who take advantage of direct traffic:

Domain name purchasers, typosquatters, cybersquatters whose intention is to purchase a domain name with typo mistake of popular brand, hence hoping to generate traffic. For more information please visit SEOmoz

Affiliate Marketers, Adsense money makers whose main intention is to make money through arbitrage.

Tracking Direct Traffic

Tracking Radio Ads and offline advertising internally: Some advertisers advertise their brand in Radio and give out the URL such as “http://radio.example.com” which is 301 redirected to URL “http://www.example.com/xyz.php?trackingcode=number”. This way the impact of advertising on the channel can be tracked. This will help in comparing the effectiveness between

1. Two different Ads..

2. Impact on other channel due to advertising on this channel and its co-relation

3. Same Ad performing differently in different cities, regions, geographies.

4. You could further extend to record Page Views, Time on Site and other details..

Google has launched tracking of Adwords audio campaigns in Google Analytics..

Below is an Interesting Example of my blog: The search engine traffic, referral traffic to my blog can be easily analyzed and explained as they are fairly straightforward. SEO, Referral traffic analysis requires no expert, even a layman can understand if they look at Google Analytics Report. However, the interesting part is the Direct Traffic Analysis, which initially I failed to understand until a few months back, hence I have decided to share this analysis in this Direct Traffic post.

Traffic Details

Traffic Share – Medium Wise

Direct Traffic User Details

What can we analyze from the given data?

What Google Analytics says?

1. 13.97% of users are direct, how are they finding my blog even though there is no offline Ads, no TV Ads, no Radio Ads whatsoever?

2. 49.37% of Direct Visitors are new visitors. How could this be explained?

3. Blog has 80.38% bounce rate (for direct visitors) which is high Can we figure out where the problem lies? What is wrong with the site?

4. Average Time by Direct Visitor is 41 seconds. This is a time taken for glancing a webpage, not even reading it.

This means half my direct visitors are new, they glance the page in 41 seconds and most of them leave without doing anything. Not sure how they are finding my site. They mostly visit 1 page of my site and bounce off the site like it was yuck.

Google Analytics does not give any details apart from the above.

Analysis from the above data

The direct users are landing on inner pages of the site. Its very unlikely they are typing the entire URL in the address bar…These Direct Users must be from RSS feeds, bookmarks.

Another data to look at is number of comments.. I get about 12-15 comments in a day most of which are junk and some genuine ones.

1. Users could be clicking on blog posts on their RSS feeds and land on specific page.. They then read and/or post a comment and leave the page.

    

   This is the reason for bounce rate being so high. The users read the blog post and leave; hence bounce rate is not relevant figure to look at.

 

2. Users visit one page and leave, therefore the Average time spent calculated is wrong. Google can only track time correctly if users visit more than one page.The reason being that when a new page is requested from the server then the log files records the time at which the new page was requested from server by the same user.The difference in time at which the page 1 was requested and page 2 was requested is calculated as time spent on the site. So, consider a example when a single page was requested then time spent by user on that page is cannot be determined. Hence average time here is the time spent on site by the users who browsed more than 1 page divided by the total number of users who visited the page.

 

3. Users are finding the blog through blog search engines, blog directories and other blog sites.
   1. They subscribe the RSS feed after which they click on blog posts in RSS Feed.
   2. Users may be finding the site through Book-marking sites, Social media sites add it to their own bookmarks, where users directly find the link to inner page of the site.

Direct Traffic is the most targeted traffic, as these visitors really read the content on your website.
Most returning visitors return through Direct Traffic, especially when you are not advertising offline. They are ideally the best source for returning visitors, hence business can sell their content easily.

This Article is Originally found at praveenkodur.com

Copyright @ 2007 Praveenkodur.com

In measurement and benchmarking of conversion rate never make comparison of conversions rates or other metrics between different websites. You often find users quoting statistics like 5% conversion rate in retail industry, 10% conversion rate in services Industry etc..

There are publicly available tools like Fireclickhttp://index.fireclick.com/: or shop.org which contain benchmarks on conversion rate statistics w.r.t to industry.

How accurate is it to fix a conversion rate number for an industry? The comparison of conversion rates is irrelevant & inaccurate, Web site A might have 8% conversion rate and Website B may have 5% conversion Rate for variety of reasons

Difference in Conversion Rates between sites may be dependent on:

1) Branding & Overall Popularity of the site: Web site A may be industry leader; Web site B may be a startup.

2) Products Service Offered.

3) Landing Page Structure

4) Sources of Traffic

5) Seasonal Offers, discounts offered by few sites.

Measuring Conversion Rates (Issues): There are issues in measuring conversion rates.

Latency issue:

a. Users may convert at later point of time; Users may bounce but return after a certain time period to sign up or complete the form.

b. Users may call you on the number displayed on your landing page

c. Users may visit your site and buy offline.

Tracking Issue:

d. Google uses a 30 day cookie

e. Analytics Software may use track differently, (Log file analysis tracks conversions differently using IP based tracking)

f. Deleted Cookies

Incomplete conversions:

g. Users who buy a product but abandon the cart at checkout page.

h. Users who fill incomplete details in form

A user visits your website many times and may be through different channels before making a purchase or converting. Is your business capable of measuring such users?

Reasons for users not converting on the site:

1. The User did not want to visit your site in First place
2. Miscommunication between Ad text and Landing Page
3. The Landing Page did not load
4. The Advertising Traffic was not directed to the Right landing page
5. >Sponsored advertising & external links on landing page may be driving away users

There are various methods to increase conversion rates.

http://www.sherpastore.com/RevisedLandingPageHB.html?8913

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/02/learn-about-landing-page-optimization.html

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/

Other Users

Majority of Users who have landed from advertising channel do not convert. Should we care about them? Yes, because they tell a different story. We can know a lot about our website if we just know the activity of these users online.

How do you measure the activity done by users who did not convert? However advertisers have paid the channel to bring them on their website. Since we are paying to get users on the site, can we identify these users and their actions?

What actions did these users perform?

• Did they click sponsored links, links to external site
• Did they view/navigate to other pages of the site?
• Perform a search on the site.
• Did they view the FAQ, Contact Us, About Us pages?
• Subscribe to Feeds
• Downloaded any content, files.
• Tagging, Bookmarked, Rated any content
• Submitted a Comment

Attributes of these Users that should be measured:

A) The Time Spent by these users on our Site

B) Depth of their Visits

C) Frequency of each Visit (Did they return again to our view the site)

D) How many Unique Visits (Detect unique IPs)

What were these users looking for? The Ad text, keywords and even the channel of advertising can give us a better Idea.

If you are an ecommerce site, find out how many times a user visits your site before making a purchase. And how many users are repeat customers, and through what sources do they visit your site.

Marketing is not about acquiring One Time conversion, it about building relationship. Therefore it is necessary to identify different users online and understand their activity, behavior to value them differently.

Copyright of this article is reserved by praveenkodur.com

In Search Engine optimization the cost incurred are mainly is on effort, time, agency cost/employee cost. While as in Search Engine Marketing, the costs are Advertising cost(which is CPC, CPA, CPM etc) and the cost of time/effort.

It is necessary to track the value derived from Visitor Engagement on the site and revenue generated,

Visitor Engagement Tracking

Visitor engagement depends on objective and size of the business,

1) Defining Visitor Engagement depends completely on the content present on your web site.

a. On a Shopping site: Engagement has to be product sale, product search etc..

b. On a Blog: It is the number of comments posted, subscribing RSS feeds, Average time spent on the site, No of page views per visit can be engagement metric.

c. On a Corporate Business Site: People might just visit to pick up telephone number, address of the business. Therefore none of the metrics work.

d. On a News Site: It is number of subscription RSS,Email. It is again time spent on article, number of comments posted, no of page views per visit.

e. On a Forum site: Registrations are a value.

f. Software Downloads Site: Number of downloads are a value.

2) Getting Users to Subscribe your RSS feed is a value. These users will read your content more than repeat visitors. It shows the measure of content popularity.

3) Users favourite the page, site in social bookmarking sites, social network & media sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com, Del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com is also a value provided by SEM traffic.

4) If Links to your blog post increases from SEM traffic, due to people positing your link elsewhere in answers etc, then it is a big value..

5) Users might land on specific detail page pick up the phone and dial the number given on page. Measuring telephone call rate is necessary.

6) For smaller business getting targeted traffic to their website is a value, since it adds to brand building etc.. if not sales..

7) For larger websites, brand is already in place, hence traffic which has a direct effect on revenue is more of a value than mere traffic from.

If the mode of revenue generation is advertising then attracting just traffic, might be worth

For small shopping sites setting up ecommerce tracking is very useful and necessary

This can be done by using the option present in Analytics Settings à Profile Settings àEdit. Give details of Currency, decimal places etc.

Tracking Ecommerce Transaction through Google Analytics

Once you opted Ecommerce tracking, you must edit the receipt page, which is the page after transaction, install a script into this page passing the order value into the Analytics system. Google has provided a comprehensive material on setting up ecommerce transaction.

For other business they need to monitor, track the objective of SEM campaigns. If not the engagement of the visitor on the site.

Optimizing SEO, SEM Campaigns

1) Generally Specific Keywords have higher conversion rate but are lower in volume

2) It is important to add as many new specific long tail keywords as possible…it need effort in research on new keywords on regular intervals.

3) The Head of the keyword list is pretty much fixed with little variations but more effort has to be made in making the tail longer…..that is where maximum effort and time as it can change the ROI of the campaigns.

4) Competitive keywords are always costly and extra effort can change CPC minimally…

a. However the efforts has to be done on Landing page creation..

b. Small changes in conversion rate by new landing page optimizations can dramatically increase ROI

5) Constant Generation of long tail keywords and new keywords are always the key…

6) Using different landing pages for each set of keywords is very good

a. Domain name keywords can be landed on home page

b. Category Specific Headings can be landed on respective section on the site

c. Product keywords or Specific keywords must be landed on inner most pages of the site or respective product pages.

7) Make sure your website ranks for all brand terms including the misspellings of your domain name etc..

a. This can be done by creating a page with list of all misspelled keywords

Using Misspellings can be a great way of generating low cost traffic…but remember there can be 2 types of users typing misspellings

a. Users who accidently typed a misspelling, will most likely click on “Did you mean - Correct Spelling”

b. Users who are uneducated or illiterate,

So you need to decide on keeping such keywords based on the quality of traffic you generate

9) For Large Websites tracking of every keyword to last metric of calculating business ROI is essential…For example:

a. Banking website could track the number of savings accounts, number of loans applied per every keyword along other details such as location, amount of loan, income of user and other other quality measurements which will help determine the quality of keyword.

b. This will help them to make a decision of increase bid rates, adding more same kind of keywords etc..

10) Track phone Calls, If you are running a Click to Call Campaign then provide the keyword which generated the call to call center executive. After the call process collect the feedback of the user and measure the business quality of the keyword, which is again fed back into the Adwords campaigns.

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