Analytics and Reporting

The analysts are coming for your job, not AI (at least not yet). Analysts stopped using Excel years ago; they use Tableau, Power BI, Looker! They see more data than you, and that is what is going to make them a threat to your job. They might not know search, but they know data. In this talk, Wil Reynolds documents his obsession with Power BI and the insights he can glean in seconds which is helping every single client at Seer at the speed of light. Search marketers must run to this opportunity, as analysts miss out on the insights because more often than not they use these tools to report. We use them to find insights.

Are your search recommendations overlooked and misunderstood? Do you feel like you hit roadblocks at every turn? Are you worried that people don't understand the value of your work? Learn how to navigate corporate bureaucracy and cut through red tape to help clients and colleagues understand your search work — and actually get it implemented. From diagnosing client maturity to communicating where search fits into the big picture, these tools will equip you to overcome obstacles to doing your best work.

With an ever-increasing slate of options in tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, marketers of all stripes are falling prey to the habit of "I'll collect this data because maybe I'll need it eventually," when in reality it's creating a lot of noise for zero signal. We're still approaching our metrics from the organization's perspective, and not from the customer's perspective. Why, for example, are we not reporting on (or even thinking about, really) how quickly a customer can do what they need to do? Why are we still fixated on page views? In this talk, Dana DiTomaso will focus our attention on what really matters.

In our rush to rank, we put ourselves first, neglecting what searchers (and our future customers) want. Google wants to reward sites that deliver on searcher intent, and SERP features are a window into that intent. Find out how to map keywords to intent, understand how intent informs the buyer funnel, and deliver on the promise of ranking to drive results that attract clicks and customers.

Search engine optimization is a numbers game. We want some numbers to go up (links, rankings, traffic, and revenue), others to go down (bounce rate, load time, and budget). Underlying all these numbers are assumptions that can mislead, deceive, or downright ruin your campaigns. Russ Jones will help uncover the hidden biases, distortions, and fabrications that underlie many of the metrics we have come to trust implicitly and from the ashes show you how to build metrics that make a difference.

You have a kick-ass keyword strategy. Like seriously, it could launch a NASA rocket, it's that good. You have the best 1099 local and international talent on your SEO team that working from home and an unlimited amount of free beard wax can buy. You have a super cool animal inspired company name like Sloth or Chinchilla that no one understands but the logo is AMAZING. You have all of this, yet, your client turnover rate is higher than Snoop Dog on an HBO Comedy Special. Why? You don't talk to your clients. As in, really communicate, teach them what you know, help them get it, really get it, talk to them. How do I know? I was you. The first five years of my agency we churned and burned through clients faster than Kim Kardashian can take a selfie. My mastermind group suggested we *proactively* set up and insist upon a monthly review meeting with every single client. It was a game changer and we immediately adopted the practice. Ten years later we have a 90% client retention rate and over 30 SEO clients on retainer.

Answer boxes, voice search and a reduction in the number of results displayed sometimes all result in users spending more time in the SERPs, and less on our websites. But does that mean we should stop investing in SEO? Hannah Thorpe will cover what metrics we should now care about, and how strategies need to change.

Great SEO is increasingly dependent on having a website with a great user experience. To make your user experience great requires carefully tracking what people do so that you always know where to improve. But what do you track? In this 15-minute talk, I’ll cover three effective and advanced ways to use event tracking in Google Analytics to understand a website's user.

Joanna will walk through tactical ways to organize your team, build system foundations, and create processes that fuel growth across the company. You'll hear how to coordinate with product, engineering, CX, and sales to ensure you're maximizing your opportunity to acquire, retain, and monetize your customers.

Getting the most out of your optimization efforts means understanding the data you’re collecting, from analytics implementation to report setup to analysis techniques. In this session, Krista walks you through several tips for using analytics data to empower your optimization efforts, and then takes it further to show you how to level-up your efforts to take advantage of personalization from mass scale all the way down to individual user actions.