I recently had the opportunity to speak on the topic of analytics at SMX Advanced in London. The topic of our panel was Making Sense Of All The Numbers. Since it was the last session on the second day, I was concerned that perhaps it wouldn't have been as well attended as it was. However, as the description indicated, We attempted to advocate various methods that could be implemented in order to maximize the investment of time and money that you have likely made in web analytics.
While I plan to share more details about my presentation, I first wanted to share a few Ah Ha moments that I had during the course of the conference. The first day of the conference was divided between an SEO and a PPC track and I switched back and forth. The first Ah Ha moment was really contained inside the presentation made by Barak Berkowitz from WolframAlpha during which I could hardly contain myself with interest and awe at this new "Calculation engine" or Knowledge Engine as they describe it. It's very cool- check it out. What was apparent however is that it's coolness is NOT immediately apparent. The main reason for that is that it is not a search engine. they need to do a better job of demonstrating it's benefits to new visitors.
The second Ah Ha moment was really more of a reinforcement of some previously less than obvious realities about Google Analytics. GA is not designed for measuring SEO. It is still a website analytics package that falls short in some important areas and this is one of them. It can certainly be "hacked" into shape- but "out of the box" lots of people complain about this in forums like these, but try to be careful never to offend any Googlers lingering about.
If you need help customizing Google for SEO, consider building a separate profile and segment all your traffic to organic. It's pretty easy to do, but you're likely to need to wait a little while more traffic builds in the new profile. I also followed some interesting threads and have experimented with getting "rankings" into the reports. Pretty neat stuff. I know more about what Google's up to, but I've been cautioned not to share any of this yet or I'll get kicked out of the Beta club.
