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Set up Analytics - Introduction |
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Thursday, 27 September 2007 |
The first step in any website analytics measurement project is to make sure you understand what needs to get measured and what is getting measured. This is as true with Search Engine Marketing as it was with Internal Search.
Search Engine Marketing is all about generating traffic from Search Engines like Google. Search traffic comes in two basic forms: paid and organic. Paid Search Traffic comes from ads placed by a company with the Search Engine in response to particular Search Terms (also called Key Words) entered by a user. Typically, these paid ads are short, text-based listing that go at the very top of the page and to the far right. Paid Search Marketing is usually called Cost-Per-Click (CPC). It’s called Cost-Per-Click because an advertiser doesn’t pay to have the ad displayed – they pay when a visitor clicks through to the site from the Search Engine.
The other half of Search Engine Marketing is generating organic traffic. Organic traffic comes when users click on the listings a Search Engine has displayed in response to a Search Term because the web site appears to be "relevant" to the Term. Organic listings are also called "natural" search. When a visitor comes from an organic listing, the site getting the traffic doesn’t pay anything. In one sense, this traffic just happens – it isn’t classic marketing at all. However, with so many web sites potentially relevant for most any Search Term, there has sprouted up a discipline (called Search Engine Optimization or SEO) whose function is to get a site listed as prominently as possible in the natural listings for commonly used and relevant Search Terms.
In both CPC and SEO, the higher the position of the listing the more traffic you are likely to get. Getting high position typically costs more – either in hard dollars (CPC) or work (SEO). But not every Search Term is equal. Some terms are queried tens-of-thousands of times each day. Newcomers to Search are often shocked at how light the query volumes are for many Search Terms. This means that having a high position for a single frequently searched Term can generate way more traffic than having high position for hundreds of less common terms.
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