Cincinnati, Ohio Web Analytics Offering

Best Search Engine Marketing Practices

SEM promises premium exposure for your website, but improving your site’s traffic is only the first step to increasing business. Getting prospects to your site is half the battle, the other half is bringing them to the point of taking action on your brand. Online marketing efforts must be carefully planned, monitored, revised and executed. With web analytics from The Creative Department, you get an inside look at how visitors are interacting with your website, site traffic patterns, which keywords are driving traffic, and which pages are converting. Continual tweaking and altering is necessary in improving online marketing campaigns and getting the ultimate results you want.

Understanding your Website Users

Our process begins with planning. What kind of website do you have? We determine the high level goals for conversion on the website (e-commerce, content site, lead-generation). Is the overall objective to make the phone ring, or clicking the Buy-Now button to order more products? We will determine proper website goals based on the type of business that you have. Once the objectives are determined, The Creative Department will begin monitoring and collecting data based on determined metrics. It’s important to know what data to look at and what data to disregard.

Monitoring – Measuring Traffic and Trends

After you site has been optimized for search engines, The Creative Department will continually monitor site traffic and conversions. We look at which pages are being well received by visitors and which ones are not. The main goal is ease of use and aiding visitors to complete a conversion in as few clicks as possible. High-level metrics that we look at are average time on site, bounce rate, page views, and percentage of new visits. After measuring site effectiveness, The Creative Department makes recommendations for site improvements. One of the most common recommendations to measure optimization success is A/B testing.

A/B testing is the process of having alternate versions of the same webpage (version A and B), and measuring which version achieves the highest conversion rate. The benefit of A/B testing is that only a percentage of visitors to the site will see unfavorable changes. After measuring changes you can determine whether or not the change to the site was beneficial. It seems like a science because changes made to a website are not made from guesses but from accurate measurements. But the real art of this continued process of testing is found in the planning and execution of the two choices. The end benefits often outweigh the amount of time spent in analysis and optimization.

Search engine marketing is realistically never finished. New techniques and methods are constantly evolving to keep pace with search engine developers who continue to improve their offerings. Unlike traditional marketing, return on investment can be accurately and instantly measured through various web metrics. The Creative Department’s web analytics process gives you a detailed look at what portions of your site are converting and what steps need to be taken to have continued success.

CD Deliverables

  • Establishment of Google analytics account or administrative access to existing account
  • Measurement for benchmark purposes
  • Outline of recommended conversion goals and sales funnels
  • Recommendations for A/B testing
  • Set up automated reporting
  • Ongoing analysis and reporting
  • Final report describing results of engagement and possible further actions as necessary

Client Deliverables

  • Full access to site content for implementation purposes
  • Full access to Google analytics account
  • Timely approval of recommended A/B testing pages