Measure What's Happening on Your Website!

Measurement and accountability - is that the first thing that comes in mind when you hear search engine strategies?

As a matter of fact, the more sophisticated search engine marketing is getting, the more advanced the main themes of the industry's premier conference, the Search Engine Strategies conference and expo, are getting too. One of the main themes of the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in New York was the accountability and measurability of search engine marketing.

Submitting your site to search engines, making sure your URLs have been added to search engines and improving their ranking is only the very first step. Any pay-per-click campaign is only half-finished if you don't have the appropriate monitoring tools in place to see how your paid search campaign is performing. And not only that - with click fraud being a real possibility, you need to be able to identify any anomalies in your pay-per-click campaigns.

In order to justify any investment you make in search engine marketing, be it buying the services of a search engine optimization firm or spending money on buying clicks through your pay-per-click campaigns in Google and Yahoo!, you need to be able to measure the results of those online marketing projects. And if you are asking for more money to spend on search engine marketing, you will have to provide convincing analysis showing how the return-on-investment compares to other Internet advertising options.

It is no longer about simply getting any type of Internet traffic to your site, the focus is more and more on the quality of visitors that come to your website. Highly advanced targeting technologies enable you to communicate specifically with the target groups you want to address while keeping your advertising costs down. More advanced targeting needs to be matched by more advanced reporting and analysis. This sentiment was shared by AOL's Gerry Campbell: "The value of metrics is transforming other marketing disciplines, which are placing more emphasis on using data to target consumer intent and deliver relevant messages in all forms of advertising."