I have a friend, who will remain anonymous, who works at Google as a product manager. He does not work with Google Analytics. One night we had this heated discussion of how Google Analytics played into their advertising and revenue models. He assured me that all these departments were, and would always be, independent. This was the inspiration for ‘Does running Google Analytics affect your SEM?‘

Several months later, Google announces Benchmarking, which allows you to “compare report data against industry verticals and gain broader context for your site.” More importantly, it lets Google use the data from thousands of website to fine tune it’s search and advertising algorithms to maximize profit like any good company should.

But since this feature is for “my benefit”, I decided to take a look.

Since I just moved the analytics for Simple Pixel over to Google Analytics last week, we are looking at a pretty small set of data. Nonetheless, it is obvious to see the value of the report it produced.

Comparison

For comparison, each site is categorized into one of three groups based on the number of visits received: small, medium, and large (outliers are removed). Based on my stellar numbers, and those of the benchmark, I am going to guess I am in ’small.’

In addition to your size classification, you can compare to a particular category, such as ‘Marketing Services.’ Each of these groups has a minimum of 100 websites in it.

Here are my issues with this:

• I have no idea what category I am in, Google doesn’t tell you.
• I have no idea how are they determining which category I am in. Does it analyze my content, keywords, etc? Most websites don’t fit neatly into one category. Shouldn’t I be allowed to tell Google how to categorize my site?
• If I don’t know how I was grouped, then what am I comparing? I have no point of reference.
• What constitutes a ‘medium’ site? 200 visits? 200,000 visits?

Basically all this has told me is that for most sites that are ’small,’ I am getting a lot more traffic than most. Great. That and $1 will get me a soda.

I could go through each section on the benchmark report, but that would be tedious and boring.

So what’s my point? I have a two:

1. This feature, as it stands, it a joke. The only value it provides is to Google.
2. Benchmarking is a great idea and everyone should do it, but set your own benchmarks, don’t let some automated software make some assumptions.

Set benchmarks against your own traffic, using historical data. Look at your own patterns over different time periods and sources of traffic. Here are a few stats that are typically good things to benchmark:

• Visitors - total, unique, returning
• Conversions
• Cost per conversion
• ROI
• Total page views
• Visits by sources of traffic

We had an interesting discussion over here yesterday. The question was: does Google use keyword, behavioral, and/or aggregate data from Google Analytics as part of its algorithms? There were two sides to the argument:

1. Yes, it provides a 360 degree view of the search experience which it can then use to improve the final search experience (and make more money).
2. No, it would violate privacy and would generally be wrong and there is no need to use that data for the company’s gain.

After some research into the Google Analytics Terms of Service, we discovered that using that data would not be a violation.

6. INFORMATION RIGHTS AND PUBLICITY . Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service.

We cannot confirm whether or not the data is actually part of their algorithms, but it would be extremely hard to believe that Google, a company that’s primary purpose is to store, organize, and rank data, keeps each of its products in their own little bubble. So how could this data be used to enhance search results?

1. Google can better understand user behavior at an industry and keyword level (average time on site, average time for conversions, total conversions, etc) and set benchmarks
2. Understanding behavior past the search engine, they can better predict relevancy factors (Quality Score, overall positioning), click fraud and ways to maximize revenue

So assuming your site is well optimized for both search engines and conversions (because Google Analytics or not, Google knows a crappy site when it sees one) the ultimate question is could running Google Analytics give you an extra boost?

We don’t full understand how all these variables impact your SEM, but we believe they are all pieces of the puzzle.

By now you’ve of heard the long tail theory. Wikipedia defines it as following; “The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.” This theory has far reaching implications beyond marketing. However, for the sake of this post, let’s focus on SEO.

Traditionally, this has been applied to keyword research and optimization. Meaning, there was no need to exert too much energy optimizing for VERY competitive keywords. Instead, optimize the entire site, whether it’s a online catalog or content play. And if you do so, the total number of clicks from these “less competitive” keywords will equal or exceed the total number of clicks from the VERY competitive keywords. Ok, so what does Compete.com contribution?

According to a recent post, Compete suggests that, “[T]he top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month.” Breaking this out by engine, Compete says, “70% of search queries in September were performed by 20% of Google searchers. For Yahoo! the concentration increased to 73% and for MSN/Live searchers 75% of the queries were performed by the top 20%.” Meaning, that most of the search query volume at the major search engines is driven by a relatively small number of search engine users: power searchers. What interesting about this notion is how marketers are spending their online dollars.

Much can be said about website analytics, from various platforms, technologies, segmentation strategies etc. However, the average marketing manager rarely has the time to sort through the wealth of data most website analytics software offer. This is a very common discussion point with our clients. “What should I really track?” Your website analytics data is more than just numbers, web traffic analysis reports should help you to increase your ROI. Understand your visitors, how they are getting to your site, and what they are doing, and help establish areas for continues improvements.

In short, once we identify goals and objectives, we suggest to establishing key performance indicators for the following data points:

• Monthly unique visitors
• Monthly bounce rates
• Analyze conversion ratios (Identify reasons for failure)
• Landing page analysis
• Return on Investment (ROI) analysis
• Monitor how users find your site
• User behavior, demographics, and click streams

Of course a key variable to establishing your key performance indicators is the nature of your site;

• Lead Generation
• Commerce
• Support
• Content (subscription)

We suggest establishing unique KPI’s for each of the above site models and picking an analytics solution that can provide you with the appropriate data.

We recommend using PixelAnalyst. In addition to being easy to use, PixelAnalyst is a dynamic and powerful analytics platform.