SEM scorecard
The SEM scorecard is an ROI report for organic and paid search results, showing the SEM triad of organic brand, organic non-brand and PPC keyword results. Note: you must break out your brand vs. non-brand keyword data to separate online and offline impact on organic traffic acquisitions and conversions.
While the primordial term SEO (search engine optimization) should receive the credit for all organic non-brand keyword traffic and conversion data, brand managers typically involved with offline advertising should receive the credit for all organic brand keyword traffic and conversion data. The third group in the SEM triad, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, should receive the credit for PPC keyword traffic and conversion data.
Drilling in deeper than traffic and conversion, ROI is positive when [value-per-acquisition] is greater than [cost-per-acquisition]. Therefore, a key metric within your SEM scorecard should be the "Conversion Value to Spend Summary."
As seen above, your dashboard should display a comparison of the conversion value to the investment and segregate organic non-brand (SEO) and pay-per-click. The example above exceeded everyone's ROI expectations. Organic non-brand (SEO) return on investment is 1,653 percent and PPC is 2,372 percent.
Executive KPI report and SEM scorecard
It requires a lot of preparation to set up the right KPIs in your dashboard and score card because there are many measurable website metrics to identify and evaluate. You must select the metrics that accurately reflect your business goals. KPIs are never permanent because your site goals can change, and your KPIs should change accordingly.
Allocating resources can be challenging, and this is where analytics modeling can help.
Analytics modeling for paid and organic search
Analytics modeling can be used to better understand how to allocate your resources and improve the performance of your search programs. To dig deeper into how the analytics modeling process works, I interviewed President and Chief Technical Officer Gary Angel of SEMphonic for in-depth information about tracking the results of individual paid and organic search campaigns.
When tracking dual SEO and PPC campaigns, Angel suggests adding a distinct campaign code to your PPC URLs during set up. This helps to learn the all-important split between natural and paid traffic.
"If you don't do that work, you'll see all your traffic as natural -- and you'll be unable to effectively compare the two," Angel said.
When used correctly, your web analytics tools can help you understand how many repeat visitors came to your site. It's important to identify repeat visitors for loyalty programs, but you can get a lot of false positives. Repeat clickthroughs can appear in your referral logs in two very different ways. Most clickthroughs will trigger a new visit (also called a session). But sometimes visitors will click through to your site, go back to the search engine and then click through again on the same or even a different search query, leaving the false impression that the second time is a new visitor.
"Your analytics program can compensates for this, and you'd be surprised how often it actually happens," Angel said.