Web Metrics & SEO

A few months back, when I was deciding whether or not to leave my current copywriting position to take on my current marketing/sales/communications/community management position (we’re a small business, so we all wear a lot of hats), I met my friend/former coworker, Nick, for a beer to discuss the opportunity. Nick has (successfully) devoted his entire career to social media marketing and, knowing that this would be perhaps the most important and most challenging part of my new job, I wanted to pick his brain about a couple of things. One of my main questions/concerns was: “How do I convince a management/ownership staff that has hitherto been resistant to social media to not only invest in it, but embrace it?” I’ll never forget Nick’s response: “Just let them know that there’s a conversation going on out there—about them, and around them—and they can either choose to be a part of that conversation, or ignore it.”   This is the attitude I believe all companies should have t...

Engagement gets analysts more toward the humanity behind the data that Margalit speaks of (Helbling & Wilson, 2017).   Kaushik (2010) writes that “[m]any people measure the time a Visitor spends on a website and call is Engagement,” but to do so is to ignore that someone might spend a longer time on a website because they are frustrated, confused, or failing to find the product or information they are looking for while another person is merely enchanted with the brand and the journey its website is taking them on. This explains why “click-through” and “click through rate-ratio” are categorized as measurements under Visit Characterization rather than Engagement—they measure the visit itself without attempting to, again in the words of Margalit (2017), “personalize” it.   Factors such as Page Exit Ratio, Bounces, Bounce Ratio. And Page Views per Visit (Web Analytics Association) more effectively lend themselves to inferring an emotional motivation behind the data collecte...

One common thought seems to emerge repeatedly in my research of web analytics thus far (particularly concerning metrics) the past couple of weeks. This thought, generally speaking, is that when it comes to web analytics, it is important to understand that data is people and people are data.   This is a valuable perspective to apply to web analytics because in the words of Dr. Liraz Margalit, “human behavior is more complex than metrics”; though might help measure human behavior, but they are not the behavior (Helbling & Wilson, 2017).   Dr. Margalit publishes a column in Psychology today entitled “ Behind Online Behavior ” wherein she approaches analytics as a “neuromarketer,” using metric data to detect “digital body language.” While Margalit believes analytics should not only consist of what people say, but “how” they say it I’ve selected the two metrics, the “what” is certainly an important starting point. Visit characterization and engagement are p...