How Can You Measure the Success of Your SEO Campaign?

Most companies understand the importance of measuring the performance of their websites, and there are lots of useful tools available to help you do just that. But in our experience, many companies－especially the small ones－aren’t tracking at all! And in a 2007 survey, 81 percent of web analytics professionals reported that the practice is “poorly understood” in their companies. Why are so many companies missing out? We think the cause is a combination of factors:
Lack of definition When goals or conversions are never defined, there’s no way to measure your accomplishments.
Lack of communication Different departments or individuals with different goals may not be sharing information.
Math anxiety Herding conversion data into a tidy, meaningful spreadsheet can be harder than it sounds, and basic algebra is probably not in the job description of most CEOs and marketers.
Technical difficulty Even with the slickest web analytics tools at your disposal, some types of conversions are difficult, if not impossible, to track.網路行銷
Hitch up your high waters and get ready for another painful truth:
There are a few good reasons why. Let’s discuss them here.
Tracking Lets You Drop the Duds
Have you ever heard this military strategy riddle? You are waging battles on two fronts. One front is winning decisively. The other is being severely trounced. You have 10,000 additional troops ready to deploy. Where do you send them? The answer is, you send them to the winning front as reinforcements. Strange as it sounds, it makes more sense to reinforce a winning battle than to throw efforts into a losing one.網路行銷
This strategy is also reflected in the maxim “Don’t throw good money after bad.” You need to know which of your efforts are bringing you good results so you can send in the reinforcements, and you need to know which efforts are not working so you can bail out on them. And the only way to know this is to track results.
Tracking Will Help You Keep Your Job
If you work for yourself, you’re the president of your own company, or you’re reading this book for a hobby site or your blog, feel free to skip this section. For just about everyone else, we suspect that someone, somewhere is paying you to do this work.
Eventually, that someone is going to wonder whether they have been spending their money wisely. Even if your boss ignores you every time you walk in the office with a report, even if your department head refuses to back you up when you try to get IT support for conversion tracking, even if Sales tells you there’s absolutely no way you can track sales back to the website, trust us; someday someone is going to want this information－preferably in a bar chart, with pretty colors, and summarized in five words or less. If you don’t have the information, the measure of your accomplishments is going to default to this:
Are You #1 on Google?網路行銷
And, if you’re not, get ready for some repercussions!