Welcome back. In this lesson, we will look at some examples from the industry on intermediate and advanced types of reporting. This may appeal to those who already have a good basis in basic SEO or digital marketing reports, but are looking for different ways to share with their clients or stakeholders what matters. In order to do these reports, requires some knowledge, resources and a commitment to really think about how this data can best represent your objectives. Some of the visual examples will give you a good understanding of what's possible for you too. But don't stop there. Begin to experiment with sample data to create reports from some of these that might appeal to you. In this lesson, you'll learn when and why to use more advanced reports, what combinations of data might be useful to share, and what format or data story you want to tell. Advanced reporting in analytics requires that you have the talent, skill and teams to gather and interpret the data, and clients sophisticated enough to appreciate the data and make use of it. I stipulate this because advanced reporting in analytics cannot be done by a small team typically, when they have other SEO or web initiatives to consider. It requires people who have a dedicated skillset, talent and aptitude for this particular area. Advanced analytics requires use of a dashboard. Marketing dashboard shows a baseline of past performance, some indication of targets around key performance indicators or goals, defining KPIs that are important to top management teams with a little bit of context based on the business strategy and reporting, as far up the sales cycle is possible closest to revenue. Ultimately, you want to present these KPIs against the target performance at a quarterly, monthly, or weekly cadence, providing insights around why the performance is up or down relative to targets, and offering actionable strategies to help counteract negative performance or continue what's positive. You may choose to present these in a slide format, Excel or in some other format that includes talking points. Dashboards provide insights and insights drive business actions. Analytics is a whole study in and of itself. Firms or companies that want to be data-driven usually struggle with connecting analytics to action. Very few companies are good at this. So data and analytics are only a means to an end aimed to use data and analytics to develop insights that drive business actions with people, process and technology in mind. This should become part of your company's culture. The end of the day, data analytics is about developing a story with insights that support the storyline. The narrative should measure performance in a chronicle negative or positive movement. The story you're creating will carry on into the future to support company objectives. Now take this with a note of caution. Once you go down the line of looking at advanced analytics, you'll need buy-in. Company culture must support it. Once that culture is in place, start with the basic performance chart. Nothing complicated. Just show month-over-month changes across different buckets of KPIs that matter. You could provide color-coded indicators in green, yellow and red to show where you're moving ahead, cautious, or have stopped relative to shared goals. When you make the data clear to interested stakeholders, you better communicate your story well. Advanced analytics moves the conversation from just SEO to larger issues like e-commerce or B2B lead generation. Here are some issues to be considered. Number 1, return on investment. Number 2, year-over-year growth. Number 3, customer lifetime value, looking at how much you're deriving from a particular customer or cookie visitor. Number 4, average order value of SEO traffic versus other marketing channels. Number 5, conversion rate of SEO traffic versus other. Six, determining the customer acquisition cost. Theoretically, it's free for SEO, but you could put a pretend or initial number against cost and then compare SEO performance against other paid channels. Other common e-commerce metrics are related to, Number 7, cart abandonment rate. Number 8, purchase intention. Number 9, search penetration, and 10, even visitor satisfaction. By evaluating SEO performance in the context of larger website initiatives and other metrics available, you can begin to do multichannel or omnichannel marketing and have the data to back that up. Then, you can start to assess for various channels and other marketing channels by asking what kind of performance measurements you want to have and determining how to compare and contrast the value of different marketing channels for various objectives that you're after. One way of sharing data is to provide two or three top-level metrics that talk about performance from search, the contribution to a e-commerce or lead gen KPI, and how many conversions are you seeing from the SEO channel to those ultimate objectives? You also might slice the data based on the market share you're seeing from different search engines. For example, compare the percentage from Google to that of other search engines. Compare the contribution toward revenue goals from each search engine to determine where you see the greatest efficiency. Try to break this down into a percentage that ultimately shows you going from a search engine, down through a visit or trial or e-commerce metric, since that can be a very effective story for an executive. You can also evaluate using advanced analytics at the keyword level. You could take a bucket of keywords that contribute to particular page or URL and look at the opportunity of those keywords. You might be considering metrics such as search volume, competitive positioning where your competitors are ranking for particular terms differently than yours, and looking at a bucket of keywords for a particular URL or product line, then comparing performance against other marketing channels. This is another great way to communicate the value of a particular keyword focused campaign against initiatives. As you think about multichannel data analysis, you might want to consider the contribution of SEO against other channels. Again, this requires a team qualified to deliver this level of insight. You can gain a sophisticated and complex view to the performance of each marketing channel by looking at things like direct entries to the website, SEO performance, paid search performance, and social or display media. If you do this month-over-month you'll see how that marketing channel contributes to the key objectives of the campaign. One additional way to consider using advanced analytics is determining the percentage of contribution of SEO to different type of products. For example, you may have a product suite that has a small, medium and large version or it may have a free or paid version. Look at the contribution of SEO through the various types of factors such as size or customer loyalty. Use these to extrapolate how you can improve your performance for SEO in its contribution to larger business objectives.
