Dit artikel is gebaseerd op: how thick is your head and how long is your tail.

Over Mark van Loon:
Ik ben zelfstandig webmarketeer (zie mijn profiel) en lees in mijn vrije tijd veel weblogs. De kennis die ik opdoe tijdens mijn werk en het lezen van de vele weblogs deel ik graag op het weblog van Karel Geenen. Interesse in zijn diensten of vragen over dit artikel die je niet in de reacties kwijt wilt? Neem gerust een kijkje op markvanloon.com en neem contact met me op!
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When it’s your own site you’re focused on, everything is a bit more immediate and personal than when you are optimizing a corporate site.

Thanks for articulating it so well.

Thanks for the post. Really helpful information.

But….
at one point I am getting confused, can you pl help me.

Below are some lines from your post.

“It is very hard to show up high when people search using Category (generic) key phrases, there are lots of “competitors”.

Another feature of Category terms is that they cost less, because they are usually generic and focus on niches and you won’t find lots of competition there, so you can use the same budget to bid on more key phrases (this is why ebay shows up on every term under the sun).”

Pl see the bold portion, for the same keywords you are saying both high competition and low competition.

Can you explain me this point.

Rest is superb. :))

Thanks in advance.
- Punit

If you are doing any pay per click advertising then you need analytics. How else are you going to track your important stats? You need to concern yourself with your traffic counts, where your traffic is coming from, what pages are being viewed, how long visitors are staying on your site, what links they are clicking, which products are most popular, and whether or not your pay per click ads are converting traffic into sales. If you can’t measure these stats then you’ll have no idea how successful you are in your advertising.
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If you have to SEO your site you would invariably have to SEO all pages for top terms..

Your site will rank high on SEO for Top branded terms only if your site ranks reasonably higher for bigger phrases or category terms.

Invariably you will have to SEO your site first to rank for smaller niches and then overall it will rank higher for bigger niche.

As for SEM, I agree for not bidding on your brand name as people know.. but for remaining 19 keywords you would have to bid as it is important to capture mind of the target audience..

It is important to be on Top 3 sponsored listings irrespective of the ROI from it as it is matters to overall branding..

For example, your sales team might quote the same to clients.. or just convincing clients, (for whatever reasons)

And it takes time to get on top 3 listings through SEO hence you would need PPC.

Despite ranking high on SEO you still want to grab more space on Search Engine by running PPC.
This will atleast ensure you get few customers who would otherwise have gone to your competition.

Please do let me know your thoughts…on the same..

First off, I’d like to say thank you for your blog, I’ve learned a lot from your very informative and insightful articles.
Now, to my question:

Where can I find a list with the complete series of the Excellent Analytics Tip-series?
I’ve tried to use the search feature of this blog but oddly enough the search with the term “Excellent Analytics” only yield half of the articles:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/index.php?s=excellent+analytics&submit=Search

Keep up the great work!

Great Info, esp for a beginner

Thanks!

-Kate

* Work with you key decision makers to document exactly what your Search strategy should be.

* Partner with your Search Agency (or internal search team) to evaluate if you giving the right “love and attention” to your head and tail, what changes need to be made to your current strategy?

Depending on your business objectives, SEO budget, and keyword competitiveness, you might choose to go after Head terms instead of the Long tail terms.

“Buying Terms” that are further along in the conversion funnel should improve your chances of getting a better ROI from your SEO campaigns. A long-tail buying phrase like “buy a car stereo online”, should provide a better ROI than any Consideration term. [...]

Stimolato da una segnalazione di [mini]marketing ho provato a buttare giu` un paio di grafici per analizzare la coda lunga delle keyword che portano accessi al TNT Magazine.

Il risultato e` abbastanza sorprendente, Su sette giorni e circa 18000 accessi presi in esame abbiamo grosso modo 5000 e passa keyword diverse, le prime dieci veicolano al sito “solo” il 14% (2500) degli utenti. Per arrivare al 50% tocca raggruppare le prime 340 key, parliamo di ricerche che hanno portato sei miserrimi accessi ogniuna. Tutto il resto del malloppo sono 4660 key per 9000 utenti diversi. Di queste 4660, 3700 un utente per ogni parola.

Tutto cio` dimostra come - per un sito che non abbia grosse risorse…..
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He gives you some ideas on how to measure the thickness of your head and the length of your tail, using excel. So you get a real sense of where things lie and how your search terms are stacking up. Obviously there’s no hard and fast rule, but he gives you great guidelines on how to develop your understanding of the curve and the curve of your website in particular.

He also talks about the difference in key phrases, dividing them into two piles “Brand Key Phrases” and “Category Key Phrases”, where the brand [...]

I definitely don’t have the tools to get into some of the more complex analytics, but I just recently started a making a push for spending less on SEM for Head terms that weren’t producing conversions on our site.
This post is a great follow-up to that effort, I now know what else I can be doing to get the most effect out of these changes.

Thanks for the excellent blog.

I have some good news for the Omniture users: you can easily extract this data from SiteCatalyst. This report is one of my favorites and is extremely helpful in understanding where one can improve match types, add new keywords, add negative keywords and in some cases delete keywords all together. In SiteCatalyst you can find this report under Commerce/Finding Methods then select the type of keywords you wish to report on (natural, paid, all keywords). Once this report renders you’ll have the keywords that were TYPED by the consumer - either from paid, natural or all keywords - your choice. At this point you now have the opportunity to further break down this report using the “break down by” option. Next just click on the “break down by” and select campaigns/keywords. Now you’ll have keyword typed versus keyword purchased (in this example for the paid search report). In addition you can break down this report even further to report on engine, campaign, adgroup, keyword etc.

Not to get too complex but you also have the opportunity do some pretty interesting reporting regarding natural search. You can see the ‘natural keyword’ someone typed and break it down by the page name, the product, the category, the URL that served as the destination page and much more. Why is this so great: now you have your natural keyword + your landing page. This means actionable data. How great is this!? Now you can extract the report and you have a great list of keywords you may just want to purchase. Otherwise you can also see where you have room for improvement in your natural search efforts! You may notice that you have lots of natural search keywords for a certain category or brand while other categories and brands are underrepresented. I have found this information very useful.

You can find more information in Omniture if you use their knowledge base. I have copied the information as Omniture probably explains their report best: “The Search Keywords reports show a list of the search keywords (or search phrases) that visitors used to find your site. The number of searches made using that word or phrase is also shown. SiteCatalyst’s proprietary technology pulls this data directly from the visitor’s browser, ensuring the most accurate data possible is retrieved.

The All Search Keywords report was formerly the Search Keywords report, and shows all search keywords that were used to arrive at your site. The Paid Search Keywords report shows statistics for search keywords used on search engines to which you paid to list your site.”

I hope this helps!

Avinash I love your blog. Great to hear that you are starting a consulting practice. Best of luck!

>>Summary: Conversion Rate = Orders / Unique Visitors..

.. but perhaps we all need to think about how to attribute multiple actions when talking about a general CPA. As in considering the fact that beyond the sale (Orders) conversion, we can have other positive conversion in the same session, e.g. a newsletter signup and a product comment. TOTAL COST FOR ALL ACTIONS should not be exceeding the factual total cost of campaigns – which it will be if you look at Total CPA (Orders) + total CPA (newsletter signups) + total CPA (product comments).

hmmm perhaps this is a post in itself. :-)

Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools
My Web Analytics Blog

http://visualrevenue.com/blog

Trying to identify other categories in a supply chain that may be earlier in the decision making process or complementary with lower competition is interesting.