Search Rankings & Benchmarkings in 2007
Posted on 24. Nov, 2009 by Franz in Web Metrics
Search rankings could by far be one of the most tangible benchmarking metrics to fall back on, back in 2007. It makes sense, really – Vertical search results champions a lot of other benchmarking metrics because mostly, those are the intangible ones. Conversion tracking needs certain customizations, personalized search funnels require time & strategy, web traffic requires either (a) loads of advertising dollars or (b) loads of communication, comment counts require heavy interaction & community building, newsletter subscribers require good content and excellent communication strategies, etc.
So what else can SEO (search engine optimization) companies back in 2007 do to benchmark their campaigns? Most of the time, it’s only by “Impressions/Hits” which tells us almost nothing about conversions, “Visits” & “Bounce Rates” which can only tell us less than half the story, “CTR for Advertisement creatives” which requires clients to spend a chunk of money and still require further tracking to prove sales conversions and sales figures? How are you going to track all the different campaigns, say newspapers, billboards, flyers, publishing ads, etc.?
Our demographics are simply not ready for this at that moment – Maybe yes to some MNCs’ (but majority of SMEs’ are skeptical of this), and for start up companies, targeting MNCs’ could be a bad idea, if and unless you have the contacts and holes. We don’t.
Put it that way, it’s even harder to account for CTR rates (back then when Google’s Webmaster Tools wasn’t very.. informative) for search, because of the limited amount of information we have. Imagine if your company is running at close to RM0 budgets for online tracking tools, you don’t have a lot of choices but SiteMeter and IndexTools. How much can this help you: Could be hugely ignorant to us last time because we were just only learning.
Google's Webmaster Tools, back in August 2006
I must say back then it was already much more comprehensive than a lot of us could’ve even noticed – But how many of us in this industry actually promoted this analytical tool as a benchmark supporter?
Google Webmaster's Tools - Today, 2009
Today, there are so many metrics that we could use for benchmarking – Whether it’s Top Search Queries to explain your website’s impressions (and ranking) for certain keywords, keyword significance to ensure content is properly targeted in search engines, links to your site (in Google’s point of view) to see how strong your linkage powers are, crawl errors to ensure Google’s confirmation in certain site architectural issues, subscriber stats to benchmark “X” amount of subscribers by “Y” date, etc.
Site Meter, adCenter analytics (until 31st December 2009) and IndexTools (now Yahoo Analytics) back then were some of the infamous ones after Google Analytics – Which seemed to us that data is never enough.
SiteMeter, back in January 2007
SiteMeter was by far one of the real timers that provided us insight to weekly and hourly databases, with very basic design and email notifications on where your visitors are from, etc.
IndexTools.com, now Yahoo Web Analytics
IndexTools was probably much more comprehensive. I believe at that moment, Kaushik and his team was gathering more ideas and doing something greater – Which resulted in a lot of changes to what we see today in Google Analytics.
