Search Marketing Metrics
By Gord Hotchkiss - March 09, 2004
At the beginning of the Balanced Scorecard, a book on the new generation of performance metrics,
authors Dr. Robert Kaplan and Dr. David Norton present an analogy to drive home their case. They ask
you to imagine entering an airline jet cockpit, and in front of the pilot, you see just one gauge.
You ask the pilot, "What's that gauge measure?"
"Altitude", you're told.
"What about the other gauges?"
"We won't be using them this flight. I'm just focusing on altitude."
"How about air speed?"
"No, that's the gauge I was using last flight. I wanted to try something different this one."
"Compass?"
"Not this time"
"Fuel gauge?"
"Nope!"
The idea is, of course, that you need a balanced set of measures to accurately monitor business
performance. The analogy got me to thinking about the metrics we typically see companies enter their
search marketing campaigns with. And I couldn't help thinking, "At least the airline pilot got one of the
metrics right!"
If it's Not Measured, It's Not Managed
After working with search marketing for 8 years, I'm amazed at the number of otherwise intelligent
marketers who enter their search campaigns without a clue of how to measure the success of the
campaign. The entire motivation for looking at search optimization is because the CEO had a hissy fit
because they didn't rank for a broad industry term that was, at best, only marginally relevant to their
actual product and service offerings. They're pretty sure they want better rankings, but they really
haven't given much thought as to why.
You do search marketing for a reason, and unless your company is run by a Fascist egomaniac, the
reason shouldn't be so your CEO can search for his dog's name and see your company's site rank number
one. Those reasons should come down to bottom line goals that align with both your corporate and
marketing strategy. Is it lead gathering, on line sales, brand building, relationship building, extending
marketing share in new areas or positioning your product against the competition? All are valid
objectives, and all can be aided greatly by a well thought out search marketing strategy. But, until you
know the reasons, you're flying blind.
Also, I've been in the boardrooms of more than one Fortune 500 company and asked to see the research
done on their customers feelings about the website and how they interact with it. Please, if you ever get
a chance, do this. At first, you're greeted by blank stares. Then the sidewise glances start between the IT
department and the marketing people. "I thought you were going to do that!" Finally, you get the answer
you knew was coming. "Uhmm…we've been meaning to do that. But we haven't really got any research
of that kind".
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The IT department probably has technical stats on user sessions, pages visited, length of session and
enough assorted statistics to choke a CTO, but no one has thought to ask a customer how they feel about
the site.
And, we've found, if they haven't done this research on their own site, it's a lead pipe cinch that they
have no idea how their customers interact with search engines.
Decide What to Measure
Search marketing metrics have improved over the past 2 years. Back then, the only metric was ranking.
The problem with this is that rankings didn't really mean anything by themselves. A high ranking was
useless unless it drove traffic. And, in turn, that traffic was useless unless it translated into something
that added to the bottom line of your business. That bottom line impact could be long term, as in the
building of brand equity, or short term, as in an online purchase or the capture of a potential sales lead.
Because search marketing was primarily used by direct marketers, it was generally the second of these
that was chosen as a performance metric.
That brings us to today, as increasingly the focus turns to ROI, as measured through conversion rates.
This measurement is primarily done on the sponsored side of search. Tools that allow you to accurately
measure ROI on organic search campaigns are still rare and usually involve gathering data from
different sources, analyzing it and, in many cases, throwing in some scientific guess work.
While the move to ROI measurement is an improvement over just measuring rankings, it's a bit like the
pilot using the altitude gauge and ignoring the other instrumentation in the cockpit. The problem is, as
you move beyond conversion tracking, accurate measurement of other factors becomes more difficult.
Conversions are Good, But They're Not Everything
A conversion is generally defined as a visitor taking an action that allows the website owner to establish
a relationship with them. It could mean capturing contact information, having them complete an online
form, or actually make a purchase. Conversions are defined on a case by case basis.
Most of the better search engine marketing companies now offer some type of conversion tracking on
sponsored search campaigns, and a few (like Enquiro) also offer it on organic search optimization
campaigns. It allows the client to see how specific keywords and engines perform by monitoring if
traffic being driven from these sources takes the actions defined as a conversion.
The problem comes when the conversion happens off line. Often, consumers use the web and search
engines to conduct purchase research, creating a short list of the best products or models and shopping
for the best prices. In most cases, this can be done without ever taking an action that could be defined as
a conversion. The researcher may gather up their information, then take it and visit a local outlet to
actually make the purchase. In this case, conversion tracking would have never recorded the visit as a
successful one.
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The Brand Value of the Online Experience
Another limitation with conversion tracking is that it can't capture the building of brand awareness
online. And increasingly, websites are being recognized as an important channel to enhance to overall
brand experience of a company.
I was recently meeting with a prospective client and he mentioned that his company (a multinational
business to business service provider) didn't really monitor online metrics because "we're not Amazon".
His reasoning what that because they didn't really sell items online, there wasn't anything to measure. He
also mentioned that search marketing wasn't a high priority because of this lack of revenue generation
from their site.
I was a little taken aback, so I probed a little deeper. I asked if they had given any value to the brand
awareness they were building when visitors came to their site for information (of which there were
thousands of pages, few of which could be found with a search engine). I asked if they had done any
research on the types of users their site attracts, their reaction to the site, the frequency of repeat visits,
and whether introduction to the firm through the website later translated into new clients. The answer
was a long and continuous string of no's, and it was becoming clear; this company had no intention of
beginning to monitor these metrics.
I hope this company is the exception, and that other marketing departments are beginning to recognize
the importance of the online brand experience. Increasingly, more and more of a companies interaction
with its clients is happening online, and the quality of that experience is vital to building a strong
relationship with that customer.
Align Your Metrics with your Goals
To measure the effectiveness of any online campaign, you should come up with a set of metrics that give
you a complete performance picture. The nature of your metrics will depend on what your corporate and
online marketing strategic objectives are. What are your unique competitive advantages and how does
your online presence contribute to them? What are the metrics that your customers measure you by?
You have to ask yourself these questions before you can begin defining online metrics.
(Note: You might want to start with reevaluating how you use metrics throughout your organization
before beginning this process. Sometimes, lack of metrics in marketing can be symptomatic of
inadequate measurement of other areas of the business. If this is the path you want to go down, check
out www.balancedscorecard.org and invest in the book by Robert Kaplan and David Norton)
Return on Investment:
If you're an e-commerce site, the primary metric will likely be return on your advertising investment
derived through online sales. Other metrics could include monitoring the frequency and nature of repeat
visits and sales, average sale amounts, profits on sales (are you driving sales on higher margin items?),
customer satisfaction levels, percentage of converted visits vs. non converted visits or percentage of
sales in specific categories
Brand Awareness:
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In this case, you will have to be a little more creative in defining your metrics. It will probably have to
involve some type of user survey to determine brand awareness at various stages in the online
relationship. A survey will also be able to determine awareness of products and services.
Building Relationship
As with brand awareness, measuring the development of stronger relationships with customers is more
difficult to do. Again, you will probably have to use other research methods to get the full picture. You
will also want to measure the duration of visits, frequency of repeat visits, sections of the site visited,
and actions taken while on the site.
Measuring: The Bottom Line
The role of metrics in online marketing is quite new, and when it comes to search marketing, effective
measurement is in its infancy.
Deciding on the right metrics is not an easy task to take on. It requires a fundamental understanding of
your own goals and strategies, your customer's needs and behavior and the values and advantages that
sets you apart from the competition. But if you're making a significant investment in your website and
marketing that website, without metrics not only are you flying blind, you're also throwing money out
the window.
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