Dave Roth will be speaking on Analytics at Engage 2018, which will take place March 8th, 2018 in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
A few years ago I founded Emergent Digital, a boutique digital marketing agency. After working in digital marketing for 15 years, primarily in-house with big brands, I wanted to turn my attention to organizations working on doing good in the world. So I started the agency focusing on things I care about personally, like sustainable energy, healthcare, education, and the like. We’ve also attracted clients in the sharing economy, which I find fascinating, and we still do work for more ’traditional’ clients like eCommerce, travel, home security, etc.
We’re exclusively digital in what we do, and mostly focused on search and social media, paid and organic. So we do a lot of SEO, PPC, Social media management, Facebook ads, stuff like that. And now we’re getting more into programmatic advertising as the technology improves.
I first got into digital marketing doing paid search in the early 2000s when it was just becoming a thing. I stumbled onto it while at a tech startup, after 5 years of working in international trade. The startup failed, and the Internet bubble burst, but search marketing continued grow and evolve. I’ve been doing it ever since, and I love that there are new types of digital media that emerge constantly. That really keeps it fascinating
2) What analytics challenges do you commonly face during your SEO engagements?
Most of our clients use Google Analytics. I love and hate GA. It’s free and it works, which is great. It can also be inaccurate and it’s not well supported, which makes me sad from time to time. GA works best with standard, static sites, like WordPress sites, for example, where navigation is old-fashioned and pages load individually. Sometimes our clients have design-heavy sites or ‘clever’ navigation, or pages templates that dynamically load different content into them, so the user flow happens without the URL changing. In these cases, analytics and SEO are both really challenging. As well, the trend toward long, scrolling homepages makes it hard to analyze and optimize for SEO. Even when GA and SEO are in harmony, It’s sometimes really challenging when clients focus on metrics that aren’t primary. For example, we have a client who is building out geo-focused pages as part of their SEO and business strategy, and right now they’re obsessed with measuring the organic search traffic to these geo-pages. Every week we explain that this GEO strategy will pay off not only in terms of traffic to these pages bus also organic traffic to the site as a whole. It’s taking time and it’s pretty painful right now.
3) How do you communicate GA insights to C-level execs?
Execs are getting more savvy. Because we work with a number of startups, our customers are generally more accustomed to looking at data, and sometimes they even have their own GA Data Studio views so we don’t have to do to much.
In other cases, where execs aren’t as comfortable with the data, we like to keep things high-level, like at the channel level. We’ll generate a view in GA that has a line graph for trending and/or pie chart to show channel share contribution, and we’ll generate a PDF and send it to them. Often we’ll include numbers but try to keep them high-level. A good rule of thumb with clients is to report numbers at least one degree of generality higher than the data we look at and work with. So for a PPC campaign, for example, we might report on the campaign level, but we work with keyword-level data and can speak to it if need be.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.