Through diligent testing and market research I have determined that if you're reporting the user sessions that your analytics system, such as Omniture, is using you're way under reporting success.

By studying the average number of people standing behind a computer user in stock photos, it becomes very clear that you must multiply user sessions by a factor of three (the Average Bystander Session: ABS).  The ABS is often referred to as a passive user or collateral impression.

Example:
Omniture shows 21,000 sessions in May X 3 ABS = 63,000 TruSessions^TM

In order to come up with this rock solid, analytical approach to proving success we monitored the stock image market over pages upon pages of results to determine the TruSession factor of three (90% of relevant stock photos show a total of three persons huddled around a single computer).  However, our research has shown that for dinner parties a TruFactor of four is required; as shown in this example.

The TruFactor is really just a way to illustrate what may be happening on a site and does not reflect any true value to you, the owner or decision maker who needs to use this type of data.  So..what's the value of it? 

Answer, not all that much.  User sessions, impressions and other metrics have their place.  They are very valuable in determining the overall health of your site, traffic sources and popularity.  They do not show the client (this may be you) if your site is working.

It's Clear I'd be Reckless to Consider Using TruFactor.  So How Do I Judge Success?

Great question, we try to lead our clients to look at the real value metrics and not aggregate numbers.

I came up with the concept of TruFactor to illustrate the absurdity of some of the metrics I have heard people use over the years.  In truth, if your site is designed to transact any type of business the one key metric you should watch is... are you ready?

How Much Money Did Your Site Make!

Once you start measuring success based on a cost and return basis, all the other metrics make sense and you can then leverage your more traditional stats to improve the bottom line  watch how this works:

OLD:  My PPC campaign is great, I'm getting clicks at just $0.75.
NEW: I'm showing a return on ad spend (ROAS) of 571%  For every dollar I spend I'm seeing revenue of $5.71!  How can I make this even better?

OLD:  Wow, I got 20,000 visitors to my site last month, I'm super and smell great!
NEW: Hang on, I'm only seeing an average value of $0.10 per user on my site.  What type of on-site improvements can I make to increase the value of my user base?  Am I paying for traffic that's just not qualified?

I think you get the idea, when you put dollars into the equation, it makes all decisions much easier.  My plea to you is to stop making revenue decisions based on non-revenue based analytics.  Like Deep Throat said, "follow the money."

When you start following the money, you'll find plenty of business.

Disclaimer: TruFactor is complete BS and Fuel Interactive, it's employees, and subsidiaries do not recommend smoke and mirror type reporting.
We do recommend checking out Shutterstock for great prices on a wide selection of royalty free stock photography.

MYRTLE BEACH, SC – April 1, 2009: Fuel Interactive, South Carolina's #1 interactive agency, has announced a groundbreaking new service to clients to retroactively optimize online marketing campaigns.  The new service offering leverages technology from Archive.org's Wayback Machine, which delivers archived versions of older websites.

The technology, the specifics of which are a closely guarded secret, is based upon updating the cached versions of older sites via a proprietary retro-posting technique on the popular Archive.org toolset.  By effectively posting a new content to a previously released site, Fuel Interactive has been able to break the real-time marketing ceiling, which has typically been seen as a insurmountable barrier in bringing product/content to market and on which Albert Einstein was working at the time of his death.  Now we finally have an offering that gives Fuel the opportunity to promote new products and services back as far as 1997, the date when Archive.org was launched" commented Director of Business Strategy Pete DiMaio.

James "Jim" Woodring, long time client of Fuel Interactive, was interviewed regarding the new service.  "I was initially surprised that development team at Fuel [Interactive] was able to offer such a compelling system.  After approving the process on my site I was amazed that the system had actually been up and running for three weeks by the time I returned to my office [three blocks away] and I had thousands of dollars in bookings, including a couple that had just completed their vacation and had already posted a positive review on Travelocity."

"We created retro-optimization because, at Fuel Interactive, we ask a lot of 'what if' questions and we're technologically innovative," said Fuel Interactive president Will McIntosh..  "We thought, hey, we've learned a lot about web design and development and SEO and analytics- what if we had that business intelligence for our clients 5 years ago?  Well now we do. Retro-optimization is a powerful technology, limited only by your imagination, and we can help you imagine more and newer ways to use it- in fact, we combine retro-optimization and multivariate testing and then we retro-optimize the best retro-optimizations to exponentially power your business forward."

Web 1.5, the previously undiscovered land between 1.0 and 2.0, ushered in with the launch of Retro-Optimization and puts control back into the hands of large corporations.  "The end consumers have had too much power for too long with web 2.0 and it's about time that [control] it's been given back to the faceless corporations that are running the show," said an anonymous CEO who looked a lot like Dick Cheney.  The genius of web 1.5 is that it gives consumers the ability to get their hands on new products and services after they undergone years of trial an error prior to their initial development.

Brian Carter, Director of Search Marketing for Fuel responded, "You may ask why then haven't we seen anything from say 2010 injected back into 2008?  Because retro-optimization will become illegal next year- so hurry up and order your retro-optimization services now, before your competition does, or did."  Brian continued: "While our Retro-Optimization is still in beta, we look forward to our clients having enjoyed the system in the upcoming previous years."

Headquartered in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Fuel Interactive provides all interactive services in-house through expert developers, designers and marketers with more than 583 years of combined marketing and Web development experience who understand the potential of well-done, effective online marketing.

Fuel Interactive provides clients a variety of services to create dynamic, individualized interactive marketing solutions that range from Web site design and Web hosting to such online applications and programs as search engine optimization, online media creative, Pay-Per-Performance and email marketing. The Agency provides clients with an easy, cost-effective way to tap into the online market without having to dedicate important time and internal resources to achieve meaningful results.

My powerpoint presentation and audio from the "Social Media: Big Sexy Buzz" panel. How to combine blogging, twitter, and digg-like social voting sites to get more readers and followers.  Plenty of laughs. Watch, listen, and enjoy-- click on the green play button below:

I spoke at ScarySEO about optimizing your pay per click advertising.  It was October 2008, not back in the 70's as the curtains to the left make it appear.

 The presentation was based on my 5 step process for optimizing anything. 

I created that process by analyzing everything I do to optimize PPC, SEO, social media, my driving, and my wife.

(Ok, no, optimizing my wife didn't work.  My SECOND wife however, is much easier to optimize.  Just kidding.)

Back to the presentation.

The slides are below, from slideshare.net... There's no audio and the slides are just talking points, so let me give you a summary... look below the presentation...

I'll talk about how the 5 Steps of Optimization apply to Pay Per Click in more depth here than I had time for at Scary SEO:

1. Decide On Your Goal

In pay per click, your goal could be as simple as to

• Get Leads
• Get Sales

Those are the most common goals (and the ones that make clients happiest), so let's work with those.

2. Establish a Key Metric

Quantify Your Goals.

• For leads, the best metric is Cost Per Lead (CPL)
• For sales, the best metric is Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)

Note: When AdWords is linked to it, Google Analytics currently shows ROI, while AdWords reports show ROAS (called value/cost).  I mentioned this inconsistency to our AdWords team... :-)

The most critical thing here is to quantify your goal. 

When working with clients, you need to agree with them what success looks like.  You can't keep clients happy or achieve their goals without clarity.  Some clients are easier to get this from than others.

Getting Target Metric Goals:

• Diplomatically push your clients for this.  Ask what their metrics look like for the other advertising channels they use (or consult your analytics coworkers if you're in an agency)
• You may have to wait until the campaign has been running a few months and has been optimized to see what's realistic.
• Ask them if the current pay per click results are satisfactory.
• Every few months, target a better number, and optimize toward it until you reach the asymptotes of awesomeness.

Results suffer whenever you test new keywords, new ads, new geotargets.  This is part of growth.  It's a necessary evil in the process of getting more.  After the new tests have been running a while, you can optimize them and decide if the optimized results are sufficient or if you should kill it. Don't let clients judge the results and kill a test too soon, unless they're absolutely horrible.

There are two phases to growth:

• Expansion
• Consolidation, or Optimization

You must expand (and spend) before you can optimize.  It's difficult to do both at once.  Sometimes clients want to make major changes AND get better results- explain to them that all new ideas are TESTS and take time to optimize.

3. Assess Where You're At (Status)

This means uncovering:

• Business intelligence: what does your client already know from other advertising efforts about the target market and what ad copy works?
• Website status: how good are the conversion events and landing pages?  It's not a bad idea to use web analytics to gauge the conversion rate of the key pages before starting PPC.  I like to see a sales site converting above 1% and lead conversions above 3-5%.  The Eisenbergs and conversion optimization will get you higher, but those are the minimums for PPC success.  Of course, this varies with the niche (cost per click is quite high in some).
• Expertise: if you're doing the PPC campaign yourself, how good are you at PPC?  Do you need outside training or PPC management?

4. Plan Strategies, Tactics, and Route to Your Goal

In pay per click, there has to be a balance between tests and running what already works.  Tests have a cost.  In more mature accounts, we use campaigns to decide how much to spend on proven results-generating adgroups versus new tests (you can only budget at the campaign level).  And sometimes, a client wants to just bang out maximum results for a while, so you do little or no testing.

If your account is new, setting it up properly will get you off on the right foot.  This is critical because poor account performance will be held against you.  In PPC work since 2004, I've seen MANY accounts that were not set up granularly enough and without ad testing.

Some tactics, used too soon, hinder results.  For example, you could get really excited about dayparting or geotargeting, but if you commence this without any historical ONLINE data, you might be missing qualified prospects.  And if you don't get enough data, you can't optimize.

You need to start with

• Good account structure
• Several unique ads per ad group

Don't neglect conversion tracking or not only will you be unable to optimize, I'll turn into the BRULK and hunt you down and growl at you.

5. Let Results Guide Your Progress (Optimize)

Here you use your quantified goal (from steps one and two) to judge the success of your pay per click tests.

This is an endless cycle that takes you back to steps three (status) and four (strategy).

What you see may tell you more about the website's effectiveness, or lack thereof, at converting prospects.  If you didn't get conversion rates before starting PPC, you'll see them now.  If CPL is too high, or ROAS too low, it may be due to a low conversion rate.  

Nonetheless, conversion rate will improve with optimization, because you'll stop sending unqualified prospects (by killing bad keywords) and you'll warm up good prospects more (with better ads).

NOW in order to optimize, you must look granularly at the performance of your ads and keywords.  If you're doing this with sales, you currently have to use AdWords reports to see ROAS. It doesn't show anywhere else.

Which ads and keywords you keep or kill depend on their performance relative to others in the adgroup.

Optimizing is complex, and will require another entire post- I've written about four single-spaced pages on that alone...

Conclusion

But this is enough to make sure you've set up a PPC testing laboratory that will work. 

And with that, you can be confident you'll get better and better results each month.
 

#10. No one can spell his name right, but Google already deals well with with mispellings.

(Yeah that was a misspelling...)

#9. Barack Me Obamadeus ranks higher than his official website.

(not really)

#8. He's on Twitter and FriendFeed, but not on mybloglog.com.  Clearly, he just doesn't get it.

#7. Sexy good looking people don't need SEO.

(Which is why I need it so badly.)
 

#5. Barack already is mentioned in the #1 google result for "presidential candidate".

#4. GOP PPC managers already rank on the first page with ads exposing the "Real Obama". Clearly, he's finished.

#2. Google trends confirm Obama is "so hot right now" and has been for a year... Barack is way more popular in social media than John McCain.  He's certain to win the general election, because social media is such an accurate reflection of what most Americans think- right?

a lot of this boils down to the # 1 reason why seo can't help obama:

#1. He doesn't need it.

Disclaimer: I am for neither Obama or McCain at this point. This is a non-partisan, not politically motivated blog post! For reals!

Fuel Interactive begins its series of man on the street interviews with Lauren, asking her about the perils of RSS, and how she feels about the government invading her privacy through blogs, logs, and twitter.

xx

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