3 Cool Marketing Reports

SEM is pretty much about sticking your hands in the mud of individual url's.  Say goodbye to thinking of sites as individual entities.  Well not a total goodbye.  SEM is a lot about assigning a value to individual sites on a list of url's, keeping the "good ones" depending on your goal, and excluding the rest from your ad, site, etc.

The numbers will lead to trends.  With trends come ideas for improvement.  And so forth.

Anyway back to the topic.  I saw this article on marketing reports in SEOmoz, and decided to pass it along to you.  When I was interning, I didn't see reports like these, and I must say it's led me to play around with reporting for my site as well.

Here's a snippet on Impression Share reports.  If you make these hourly, then you'll start to see how visitors come to you.  

This is the report that you can print out, make all pretty, point to and say “LOOK! I need more money!” I know … that works in all companies right now, right? Well with this report you can show how much traffic your campaign is missing out on due to bids and position. It comes out of the Campaign/Account Performance report. The trick is to turn off all the other data points that you usually see and focus on what you are missing.

Here are the instructions for creating this report.

Here is a look at what you might see. This report shows that this account lost almost 60% of traffic due to their ranking and 2.37% based on budget. They take in about 38% of the total impressions their account could be seeing. Not good. But in a slow economy, some of this might make sense. The report only gives you part of it, the interpretation of the data is why you have a job. *wink* 

The Black Hats v. The Google SEO Guide

As you should know, Google came out with a guide for effective SEO. If you didn't hear about it, look down a few posts and check it out.

Well the black hats are none too impressed. From SEO Black Hat:

...What if, instead, we did a case study?

On the one hand we will take a new site and follow Google’s SEO Starter Guide to the letter. We will limit ourselves only to the techniques discussed therein. (Note: there is virtually nothing in the starter guide about link building).

On the other hand, we will take a new site and do the EXACT OPPOSITE of every point of Google’s Quality Guidelines.

So, in the 2nd case:

* We will Make the pages primarily for search engines, not for users. We will deceive our users and present different content to the search engines than we display to the users (known as cloaking)

* We will Embrace tricks intend to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is that we would never want a competitor to know what we are doing. Another test is “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” The answer will be an emphatic “NO!” on both points.

* We will participate in link schemes designed to increase our site’s Page Rank. In particular, we will link to other web spammers and “bad neighborhoods”.

* We will use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages.

* We will employ both hidden text and hidden links.

* We will cloak and use sneaky redirects.....

This is a topic thread to keep an eye on. If the guidelines were more an instruction manual for the average SEO to succeed, then it's a good thing as well. If by publishing the guidelines it means that Google is officially beginning to crack down on Black Hat SEO tactics, then it means a sea change for SEO. If black hat tactics are blocked and not allowed to succeed, then SEO has changed forever.

A Statement from Google on Outbound Links

I would imagine that inbound links still have more weight, but it's good to see that outbound links get some cred. For bloggers, this is big. Yes, I need inbound links, but since this blog is an unpaid venture, I also need to spend my time on things that make me money.

From the office of Google:

...Relevant outbound links can help your visitors.

• Provide your readers in-depth information about similar topics
• Offer readers your unique commentary on existing resources

Thoughtful outbound links can help your credibility.

• Show that you've done your research and have expertise in the subject manner
• Make visitors want to come back for more analysis on future topics
• Build relationships with other domain experts (e.g. sending visitors can get you on the radar of other successful bloggers and begin a business relationship)....

The key is in the word "thoughtful".