1. The service offered wasn’t capable of producing value.
2. The client/customer/receiver of the service was unprepared or unable to implement.
3. The value the service did provide was measured against an impossible standard set in the sales process.
4. The value wasn’t measurable or easily communicable.

No, the book didn’t specifically refer to PPC or SEO engagements, but think about it: doesn’t this sound about right? Especially for those of us who have worked in an agency environment, how often have we come up against clients who are unable to implement, unrealistic expectations made by the sales team, or *gulp*, difficulty in measurement of communication of value?

Are Our Crafts Capable Of Producing Value?

Absolutely.

There is no doubt about it, even as competition continues to rise and even as some competitors choose to cheat: paid and natural search provide both tangible value (revenue/ROI) and secondary benefits (brand impressions, presence, high-funnel awareness) to our clients or companies.

In most cases, certain segments of the efforts will always fail to create value. Office Depot running paid search ads for paper clips will always be ROI-negative, unless paper clips start costing $50 a pack.

But how is this different from any other channel or effort? Have you ever seen the Goodyear blimp running light board ads over the Mojave Desert? No.

Channels/efforts are not what ROI comes from. ROI comes from the smart management of that effort.

Are Our Clients/Companies Incapable Of Implementing?

Most of the time, yes.

This is a major problem for people in this field. And while it may feel like it’s a much bigger problem for SEOs than it is for paid media managers (because paid media can happen off-site), it’s a huge problem for both.

Remember that even though the efforts that go into both paid media and SEO are geared toward traffic generation, the ultimate decider of ROI for each visitor is dictated by the web site. If the web site can’t turn a visitor into a customer, success further up the chain is irrelevant (similarly, if the value of that customer is low, like the paper clips, above, it’s also difficult, no matter how good your site is).

To effectively increase the value of both paid media and SEO, it’s imperative that our clients/companies are prepared to learn from the traffic they receive and modify the actual engine of conversion – the web site. Optimizing media or trying to rank for new things without overhauling the engine is just dancing around the fire, not making the fire hotter.

So, this will probably be the #1 barrier to success, but through expectations-setting and discussing the work that went into (and the benefit of) successful engagements you’ve had in the past, it can be overcome.

Can We Create The Utopian Value Our Sales Team Promises?

Your sales team / internal stakeholder is probably underestimating the value of vanilla, which is why they are pouring sprinkles, hot fudge, whipped cream and cherries all over your offering.

An oversell is usually a result of an insecurity about #1, whether your offering will create value. Look at some case studies where the vanilla offering worked. What was the outcome?

Are the sprinkles really necessary?

Is Our Value Measurable & Communicable?

If you think the answer to this is, “no,” or, “It’s difficult,” you should spend some time on your company’s TV or print campaign.

It is true that our value can be hard to articulate, especially when we’re talking about the intangibles in higher funnel positions or in awareness-building. It can also be hard to measure. But that’s only relative to things that are incredibly easy to measure in digital; compared to other efforts your company undertakes, this is a cinch.

Remember that your business is probably already used to having to wrangle tough concepts or buy media on minimal data. Make every effort to tell a story about how your media influences people. Write a narrative. Make it something people can wrap their minds around.

We tend to tell our stories in spreadsheets. I’ve never read a compelling spreadsheet that made me appreciate exactly how, in a qualitative sense, people engage with me. And while it’s true that we can look at the quantitative figures of how people engage with us, it’s lazy to think that there isn’t a more qualitative story happening above those numbers.

Once you understand how (not just that) people react to your messaging, how (not that) they arrive and experience your offering, and how (not that) they buy or don’t buy, you can take steps to improve each step. The qualitative is what tells you how to improve, allows you to tell the story, and allows you to talk about the decisions you made along the way. And decisions (why and how you make them) are what make you valuable.

Tackle #2, & The World Is Yours

The biggest barrier to your success will be inaction. Focus your efforts on that to ensure you have something to measure and talk about in the first place.

Once you’re good there, make sure you’re telling a story that helps people appreciate the why [it happened] on top of the what [happened], and it will lead you to a continually rising level of measurable and communicable success that exceeds expectations.

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

First, there are the investments we make in our future: things we build on, knowing our initial investment is just the beginning. We see our children this way, to draw a personal example.

The second mentality sees investments as expenses: something we have to have, are forced to maintain over time, and hope to spend as little as possible on in the future.

Ask a boat owner if they know this feeling.

How Does Your Business See Its Website?

The purpose of web analytics is to look at our websites and our businesses as maleable, dynamic creatures, constantly in need of improvement and encouragement.

Websites are like innocent little babies, sometimes ugly (and like babies, we aren’t always honest about this), sometimes cute, but most of the time, they are in need of a lot of attention so they don’t just sit there and poop their pants all the time.

Website analytics plays a key role in our parenting. It’s how we observe the site, correct its behavior, socialize it, help it develop its interpersonal skills, etc.

When you look at your site like a boat, however, you just made a major purchase and are entering this endeavor with a mindset that will definitely lead to problems down the road.

Without giving your site the attention it needs, it’ll grow old, irrelevant, and break down, sometimes leaving you in the middle of the lake. When your boat gets old and starts to have major problems (or you have severe boat envy), you’ll ruefully go out and buy another one, most likely.

This is what happens with a website “re-design.” It’s the new version. The upgrade. But you don’t see Google, Zappos, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Huffington Post and the like out there getting new boats.

They are, instead, forging their sites over time, making small, frequent changes that add up to huge differences over the long run, but don’t represent the enormous incremental investments that redesigns end up being, since the changes are smaller and related to the behavior they observe. The changes these sites make aren’t wild guesses about how to completely overhaul the entire offering like whole new boats are.

SEOs have a great opportunity to infuse their business with a better mindset that encourages small and purposeful growth, rather than huge redesigns (which have clear and often dangerous SEO implications). This is because you guys (and ladies) have tremendous insight into where needs are and aren’t being met, and where content and architecture does and doesn’t help produce results.

What would it take to change the way your company views its investment in its web presence?

It’s worth noting that some sites may be technically incapable of this sort of growth and a redesign and new model may be needed. SThat new model should be created with the intent that there isn’t yet another major redesign out there in the future somewhere. Make this site fit your new, nurturing mentality, and go forward from there.

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

When I was in college, I had a professor who claimed that circuit boards ran on the smoke that was contained within the various chips, capacitors, and other gizmos on the board. How did he know this?

“Because when you let the smoke out, the computer stops working,” he said. The smoke, he claimed, needed electricity to do all of its thinking and computing, but if you put too much electricity into a circuit, it would force the smoke out and kill the computer. “You need some electricity, but more isn’t always better,” was the key lesson.

And somehow that was hilarious to me, because of course, I am a complete dork.

I think that our jobs are pretty similar when it comes to data, information, analysis, etc. To function, we need a specific amount of flow, a “current” of information to think on and react to. Too little and our decisions aren’t powered. Too much and we let the smoke out.

Today, many businesses who think they are operating with too little current are actually victims of analysis paralysis. The number of tools they are using, the various data sources, the multitude of specialists, the tsunami of research and the heavy and unavoidable opinions of senior management are all choking productivity and progress in your company to a lifeless state.

We believe that one more piece of data will prove our theory. Or one more Forrester research piece will cover our asses in a risky decision. But the best form of risk mitigation is — and will always be – inaction. Something many businesses have gotten very good at.

What You Can Do About Analysis Paralysis

Start with some very simple data and ask yourself, “Does what I have in front of me help me directly address a shortcoming in how we serve our customers, or a segment of them?” Often you’ll find that the simpler the data (conversion rate by keyword, or traffic source, for example), the clearer you’ll be able to see a performance gap.

If you can answer that question, add a little more data. Ask the same question. Pick some other sources, and ask again. What you’re looking for in this process is the right amount of information, where the marginal cost of doing more research is still far exceeded by the marginal benefit you’re building a case for 80/20 people. But set a deadline. Give yourself just one week to build your case. Pretend you’re getting ready for a big court trial. The judge isn’t going to move the trial date. You need to be ready in one week. Then it’s game time.

If you can more clearly see a performance gap when looking at one very small bite of the information your organization consumes than you can on an average Wednesday, you may really have an analysis paralysis issue, and it’s equally likely you’re an organization that “publishes” ideas, rather than testing them.

While changing this mentality will be tough, it’s 2011 and it’s time to use the Internet for its strengths. It’s going to be a long road, but you will have a much better company, and much better results when you break this habit.

The data you create with your actions will be infinitely more valuable than the publicly-available data you use in your planning phase. The only way to tell if an orange or green call to action is better is to push past the research phase and into the action phase. Put ideas out there. Try new things. And I don’t just mean button colors. Find ways to delight your audience across all of their intents, even if they’re not conversion-oriented.

Keep the flow of information going, but the right amount that keeps the machine running. Don’t let the smoke out by trying to jam too much information through your organization, because your organization will shut down, if it hasn’t already.

Unlike the circuits, you can put the smoke back into your company. Want to swap some ideas about how to handle your case? Let’s talk on twitter!

Yesterday, my company released a response to our friends, summarizing our thoughts (I’ll put a link at the end of this post, but I’ll summarize the response here). In it, we discuss that there are two issues here.

One is the tactical issue of cheating, which, of course, has been covered in great detail.

The second issue isn’t getting as much attention, and it’s philosophical in nature. Companies are still looking for the easy and cheap way of accomplishing their goals, rather than actually taking the time to understand what the market wants and delivering fantastic site and customer experiences.

What is truly amazing about this situation, and others like it, is that we don’t look at why Google is placing such disproportionate weight on links, particularly in this case, when so many of the links are of poor quality.

Even when Google’s algorithm caught JCP with its face covered in cake and icing, the resulting shift downward in rankings (as described in the NYT article) was pretty meager, especially when compared with the effect after human intervention.

Of course, links are tremendously important to search rankings, and all of the brilliant readers of Search Engine Land understand that.

However, what we have here is a situation where JCP as well as many other brands / retailers, have a complete void of assistive and rich content to accompany their site experiences, and that lack of content is what requires search engines to look off the site for signals that this site and these pages are even worth considering.

The sad part is that in the physical stores, you can interact with salespeople. These people will talk to you about what bedding will look good in your home. They will help you dress for your first day at the new job. They will tell you what the bulleted list of product features on a steaming iron actually does for you and your clothes.

What these salespeople don’t do (in most cases) is just blab out some marketing language about each product and have a call to action on their foreheads.

The even more unfortunate part of all of this is that there were tremendous resources (in people and money) poured into link development and gaming Google (which continues to happen at thousands of companies who are seeking “the easy way”).

All of those resources could have been put into researching what users were looking for in search, what users were doing on the site (and not doing), and creating a brilliant site experience with relevant content to satisfy all of those external search and on-site hopes and dreams.

Doing this would have naturally separated JCP from its competitors who were not willing to invest in creating a genuinely great site experience or developing the same content on their site.

Brands Are Missing Big Opportunities

Today, most commerce sites look more like self-serve warehouses (albeit very pretty warehouses) than real stores with helpful salespeople. Brands tend to approach the real-world experience with customers in a very human way: they ask questions, learn what people want, and know that by giving them a good customer experience, they will succeed in the sale.

Online, however, these same brands turn into scientists, devoid of this same warmth and care for the customers’ needs, instead focusing on how many walls in their mouse maze need to be electrified and where they need to relocate the cheese to get more mice to their meal. Or worse yet, they just dump 10,000 mice into the maze, knowing that at least a few won’t get shocked, die from exhaustion, or jump out of the maze entirely (scientifically known as “mouse bounce rate”).

The issue is that companies are looking for quick wins with no effort. And they’re looking for these wins to build loyalty, brand affinity, conversion rates, and all of the sorts of things that “quick wins” actually do completely the opposite of.

Usability is not the practice of making people do something. It’s the practice of studying what people want to do and making their experience better. Consider what would happen if the usability of the air conditioner in your car were to make you choose a temperature that Ford thought you should want. You’d probably hate your whole car.

I’d urge us to collectively think about what a future where we truly deliver great experiences to our audiences looks like. Does that sound like something Google would want to rank highly? Does that sound like something that would garner word of mouth? Does it sound like it would have greater conversion, greater loyalty, greater customer lifetime value? It does to me.

Today, I can only list a dozen or so brands off the top of my head who I feel really care about me. And I pull my wallet out for them more than anyone else, I recommend them, I invest in them. I can list a thousand brands who I feel will cut any corner to do it the easy way, knowing I’m a captive or forced audience, or just knowing they have another bucket of mice they can dump into the maze.

There’s a reason for this ratio. But I think it’s a terrible one, because nobody in the short list I mentioned first is struggling for cash flow.

Truly analyze your audience; look at them as human beings, not mice. Pretend they are right there in front of you. How can you give them something truly better? Google is dying to rank that experience first, because Google wins when the user wins.

More reading:

• Our response to our clients and friends on the NYT JCP SEO Debacle
• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• 3 Issues To Consider Before Focusing On More Traffic

(Think you’re better off if you’re talking about ROI, instead? See the bottom of this post.)

Issue #1 – Your next customer probably isn’t the same as your current customers

First, traffic-focused thinking makes the pretty wild assumption that your next wave of traffic from the paid search or SEO fairy will have the same qualities as the traffic you already have (or some diminished marginal return). That you’ll have similar bounce rates, pages per visit, time on site, conversion rate, loyalty, etc. Or in some cases with desperate or naive marketers, they think the next wave of visitors will somehow be magically even better than your current visitors. I don’t think that’s a safe assumption.

Yes, there are times that you can feel comfortable that an untapped, quality market is out there, but when you’ve covered all of the obvious bases and are looking to sweep in the corners or find a whole new world of customers, these expectations break down very quickly (and they should).

Issue #2 – Real upside comes from a new approach, not more traffic

The second issue is that we treat the website as a fixed object. That the “funnel” can’t be changed, and we need to dump more in the top to get more out of the bottom. I would argue that the best way to get more out of the bottom is to plug the holes in the funnel, not keep dumping more in the top.

While I have to acknowledge that most websites are startlingly difficult to change, let’s be clear: the reason our websites are difficult to change is because we have acted like they are difficult to change. Believe me, if we were forcing the organization to make meaningful changes and optimizations to our websites every day or week (in an organized way), the developers would find ways to make that work a heck of a lot easier, until publishing changes is a cakewalk.

By changing our sites, we can change the potential value of every single visit to the site, learn from our changes, and continue iterating until we satisfy peoples’ needs so well, they can’t help but fall in love with us. Change the funnel. Frequently.

Issue #3 – You may be missing (or ticking off) your biggest marketing asset

The third issue requires a bit more introspection about your brand and company culture. That this traffic-centric mode of thinking doesn’t even remotely tap into the huge advantages of modern consumer behavior.

We live in an era where our customers are the ultimate marketers, if we do a good job with them.

Brands like Apple, Starbucks, Zappos, Amazon, Williams-Sonoma (before they got rid of their awesome lifetime return policy), Whole Foods, Vitamix, Titleist, TOMS shoes, Chick-fil-A, [fill in the brands you're crazy about] know that the majority of the people that do business with them will tell 50 of their friends how awesome their interaction with that brand is. They’ll do it in person. They’ll do it on Facebook and Twitter. They’ll make songs and videos.

But you can’t fake this by starting some lame social media campaign or changing your TV ads, artificially dosing up on pop culture. You need to live with your customers, assume the risk it takes to do something truly better, and then watch profits do things you never thought possible when the market rewards you for actually caring.

Some brands really do care, but the world would never know it. Figure out a way to show them you care, genuinely. Show your customers how their feedback molds the products and services you offer on a 1:1 basis. When they feel like you’re listening, they’ll talk more constructively and more positively. The opposite is true when they feel like you’re just broadcasting.

What Web Analytics Teaches Us: Caring Is Cash

Businesses want to increase cash flow. That is the sole source of life for any business. So, if your company is asking you for traffic, they are asking for you to look at the world through your keyhole while they take care of the rest, and that should at least sort of piss you off. Especially in search, where we get so much insight into what our “traffic” (What are living, breathing customers, Alex?) wants, more than almost anywhere else in the entire business.

It amazes me how many people clock in and out of work each day just manning their one station, not thinking about the real output. “I just do my job and don’t ask questions,” they say, as they chase goals for unique visitors, pageviews, or newsletter signups, never questioning that they don’t deposit uniques or pageviews in their bank account twice a month.

How does your business make money? How could it be more successful? What are some simple ways, and what are some radical ways to amaze our customers and tap into their behavior? Don’t you have mountains of information that could make your business smarter about its customers, alter its experience and offering, satisfy more people, and reap the financial rewards?

Create buckets. Which keywords map well to conversion? Which keywords don’t? Quit putting conversion rate or ROI as a metric next to every keyword. When someone types “Best Buy locations Atlanta” into Google, why in the hell are we trying to measure website ROI against that?

Find the micro-conversions for each relevant topic or bucket of terms and intents, and map each bucket to your success in those micro-conversions. Systematically go through each type of intent and figure out what you could be doing better. I promise it’ll be a lot easier than trying to figure out how to get the conversion rate of your “store hours” keywords up.

This type of analysis is about caring what your customers want in all scenarios (intents), not what you want in all scenarios (their money).

When you find yourself identifying the gaps between what customers want and what you provide, you can take simple and obvious steps to close those gaps and even find small ways to delight customers when they do simple things.

Once you stop trying to map everything to dollars and start mapping intents to outcomes, you’ll first find that your existing traffic’s needs are woefully under-served, but you’ll have a much easier time identifying how to better meet those needs.

You’ll quickly understand that investing in incremental customers you’re horribly unprepared to serve is not the best use of your company’s funds; it’s like opening a store before you’ve organized the shelves and trained the salespeople how to use the register.

If you think that it’s a leap of faith that closing gaps in service and pleasing your customers will have significant financial rewards, consider how big a leap of faith it is to use the same metric of success (ROI) against your whole customer base and their varied intent.

How can you figure out how to move the needle when you’re numb to what people were trying to accomplish? Believing you can build a better, more profitable business through tunnel vision requires more faith than I’m capable of.

One Last Thing

We also talk about “increasing the ROI” of our search marketing campaigns, and we think that’s more sophisticated than the simple “increase traffic” conversation.

If you’re looking to modify ROI by only looking at your keywords, bids, landing pages, your creative, or your SEO, you’re missing at least 50% and as much as 90% of the opportunity.

The site is the engine of ROI. Work with your clients or your company on fixing the site to improve conversion for every single visit. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking your site can’t be changed. It can be, and it must be. And your customers are telling you exactly what to change, if you care.

Do you?

In a race, you are judged in one way: how did you finish?

If you hit higher speeds, avoid crashes, navigate the twists in the road, and stick to a good plan, you significantly improve the chances of crossing the finish line first. The same goes for our websites. Good planning and research, along with good execution, means we will hugely improve our chances of winning the race.

But as we all know from our own lives, planning can be a mess, we see turns coming and people choose to ignore them, UX and IT are screaming and fighting in the back seat, each of the 4 tires are made from different manufacturers, and our engine runs on a liquid form of fear and threat of job loss or public humiliation.

The problem is that as SEOs and paid search marketers (or whatever role you play), you are all judged by the outcome of the race. But in reality, you are a passenger on the site (the site will really dictate how successful your search marketing is once people land where you send them), but you’ve been given very little opportunity to actually drive.

Search marketers need to play one of the most prominent strategic roles (perhaps more like a crew chief than the driver) when it comes to how the site is designed because they have incredible insight into why people are coming to the site, what they expect, and where the site fails to deliver on their good efforts.

But the reality is that while you’re able to adjust the position of your seat, you often have little to no real influence on site design or architecture.

How To Operate Like A Race Team

1. Plan for the curves in the road. Don’t let your research go to waste. Understand the landscape. Understand the search opportunities. Understand the competition. But most importantly, understand the vehicle you are in. A minivan can’t take a turn the same way a race car can, so plan for an appropriate path for your business.

Your conversion rate, even for a completely utopian search campaign, can only be as good as your site. Make sure that everyone is on the same page and agrees on the best approach. If people criticize your conservative approach, clearly outline the limitations of your particular ride and ask them if they want to help upgrade the business.

2. Choose a driver. You need to figure out who is going to actually have their hands on the wheel. This person has the final say on the site, and the outcomes ride on their shoulders. And everyone needs to know who this person is. In the post-mortem of each campaign/month/year, you can analyze the results and decide who else on the team could have improved their performance, but during the race, trust your driver.

3. Get your butt out of the car, unless you are the driver. You can have radio contact and pass helpful information, but your job is to prepare the driver, not freak them out and act like your mom did when you first started driving, grabbing onto parts of the car and screaming when she thought you were going to crash.

Get out of the car, stop freaking everyone out, provide helpful and accurate information in time for the driver to react, and then trust them. And if your driver is an idiot, ignoring good advice and feedback, it should be very easy to show that.

Most SEOs, for example, know all too well that the decision of whether SEO is really done on the site is ultimately not theirs. When we try to grab the wheel, all we do is frustrate the driver, frustrate ourselves, and take the car off the road.

This urge to grab the wheel is why we see the radical swings in the “most important thing we’ve ever done” all the time: Flash, cool shiny buttons, social media kamikaze, landing page obsession (while the rest of the site doesn’t look anything like them); these are all signs that someone jerked the car toward a shiny object. We just can’t do that and still be a nimble, reactive business (you never see companies like Apple, Amazon, Zappos, etc. do these types of things – they plan and execute).

If you feel like you aren’t getting the driver’s attention, the nice thing is we have all of the data we could ever want to prove that them ignoring you costs the company a lot of money. Show the missed opportunity. But please, just don’t try to steer the car from the back seat, and we should ask everyone else to do the same.

4. Get a better car. Once you have all of the extra baggage out of your car, you’ll start to realize that slow, bulky, lurking business can get a lot better. Of course, when everyone was in the car, it was impossible to use a race car. But now that you have a single driver, take advantage of the new agility and upgrade your business process so you can be more aggressive, quicker to react, more decisive, and more efficient.

We are asked to perform miracles in our minivans. It’s time that we took a step back and realized how limiting our vehicle itself is. Once we start fixing that problem, we can out-iterate, out-idea, out-maneuver, out-react, and out-perform our competition, and make it look easy.

The pivotal factor is that a lot of people can’t all be clamoring for control. It just won’t work. Use good analysis to identify the right plan, execute, analyze, and execute again. And trust that you will get the credit you deserve.

So go for it, call the minivan ugly, slow, and stupid. Make a plan to fix your site and its operations, play your critical role in the process of planning and execution, and leave them all in your dust.

Have some more time? Read some more web analytics goodness (my blog) or soak up some more time here on the Analyze This column.

Today, reporting is largely considered a way of conveying the facts and statistics of our web site, search efforts or other endeavors, but the truth is that none of it really means anything, and at its worst, doesn’t represent “facts” at all. Here are the types of things we talk about in reporting:

• How many people came to our web site
• How many visits those people had
• How many pageviews those people had, if they didn’t bounce
• What percentage of the time that traffic returned some revenue or other valuable event
• etc.

And it’s not absolutes that matter, right? We rarely talk about the total number of pageviews, because getting 12 million pageviews isn’t all that informative. We want to know how many pageviews each visitor had on average or how many they had in the average visit, so we can see whether the site really drove a lot of interest or not. Same thing with conversions. We want to know the relative measure of performance for our traffic: does search drive “productive” traffic? Are these things trending upward or downward? You know what? It doesn’t freaking matter. Because averages are lies.

There is no such thing as an average. No average clickthrough rate. No average conversion rate, no average bounce rate, page views per visit, percent new visits, any of that. Why? Because there is no such thing as an average visit or visitor. Nobody is capable of looking at 5.82 pages in their session. Nobody in the world is 12% interested in digital cameras and 6.9% interested in washing machines in the same visit. Nobody converts 2.9% of the time. They either do these things or they don’t.

And nobody knows this better than you lovely, attractive, and highly intelligent search people, because you understand with certainty that there is no such thing as an average visit, otherwise there would only be one keyword driving traffic to your site (I’ll let you use your imagination about what that keyword might be!) But we know that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of keywords drive traffic, and these different keywords represent myriad needs, interests, or intents. And a lot of these keywords don’t have a prayer in the universe of creating a real conversion, but they will absolutely provide value to your company and your visitor (with the possible hopes of a conversion down the road) if your marketing and your site are doing their job.

What I’d urge us towards in 2011 is a new way of reporting (and acting on that reporting) that revolves around the key concepts of information architecture. There are two ways you can break down and understand every single visit and visitor on your site that allow you to determine the success of your efforts in search and on the site. Let’s use those.

A Quick Primer On Information Architecture

The most basic and fundamental components of IA are users, context and content. Here are some descriptions that will come in handy for the purposes of this article, but there is a lot more to learn about IA if you’re interested, and I’d imagine that some IAs may debate some of the finer points of these definitions. But since I have the keyboard at this particular moment, here we go.

Users are just people. People with histories, preferences, issues with their in-laws, and mean-ass pets that they swear are well-behaved. I don’t mean uniques or visitors; I literally mean real, actual people, like the ones you see in the grocery store.

Context, then, is what their current situation, need or pursuit is all about. “I need a new dishwasher,” is a context. “My pet won’t stop pooping in the kitchen,” is a context. “My digital camera’s pictures suck compared to Fred’s” is a context. Context is the reason users choose the keywords they choose, attempt to navigate where they navigate, and view what they view. But don’t confuse context for users, or people, because different people with the same context will behave differently. A self-proclaimed smarty-pants will shop for a digital camera very differently than a friendly novice; they will use different types of information to narrow their choices, learn more, compare prices and ultimately convert. So let’s just say context describes the current need. And a “visit” or “session” is literally the intersection of a user and a context.

Content is what you deliver. Your site is content. It’s the good that your site provides to those users with their contexts, and depending on the type of content you have (and the organization of that content), you will have visits that sit on the spectrum between satisfying or not satisfying the visit. SEOs ride companies pretty hard about creating better content around various topics, and they should. Because for the vast array of information-gathering searches/visits/intents, most sites are just trying to drive a conversion rather than really trying to help this particular context.

And The Point Is?

But wait, isn’t all of this just a fancy way of saying, “Use segments?” Well, yes. But no, too. Because we are not just making segments willy-nilly. We are picking specific types of segments related to the two factors in IA that help us understand how productive our visits are. We want to understand our users (your org may have defined personas) and the contexts (which often relate directly to funnel position, or how close to conversion they are), and report on those breakdowns. And what we are reporting on is whether our content is working for these segments.

As an example, let’s say that you do sell digital cameras on your site. How can you determine a sophisticated user with a high funnel position? How about people using Linux, or people running Chrome on a Mac… that sounds like a techie to me. And how about if they search for “digital camera reviews”? There’s your techie high-funnel visit. How did your site do? What about your nontechnical (AOL connection using IE 7) visits with the same search?

Obviously we are talking about some pretty small groups of people here, and no, I don’t advocate making a 4,000 page report every week. But start with some users and contexts that are “no duh” segments and work your way backwards to a realistic subset of personas and funnel positions, and ask yourself if you have the content to satisfy their visit. You’ll also see that measuring everything against conversion rate is totally stupid. Obviously, many of your segments have no prayer of converting. But what you will begin to see is the current: the force that moves people down through the funnel in successive visits. But you’re finally measuring and reporting on something that isn’t the “average” person; you’re talking about something that really tells you if what you are doing is working for real people with real needs that your business can satisfy. You goal shouldn’t be to outline every segment but to drive the point home that breaking things down into pieces means a whole lot more than keeping it “high level.”

There is no getting around the fact that this is going to take a ton of time, especially when you first get started. But in my experience, this reporting paints a clear picture of where the site is strong and where it is weak (and also where your paid and natural search efforts are weak/strong), which changes the focus of the conversation from radical guesses about how to improve pageviews per session for the “average” visitor toward conversations about how to more appropriately work with specific types of people and their specific needs.

If you want even more to think about for 2011, take a look at my predictions (and hopes) for web analytics in 2011, and weigh in on those, too. We’re in for some really exciting changes in 2011.

How close to this do you think you can get next year?

Get ahead of them. It’s time to get your “coffee is for closers” mug out and get ready to sell those execs on what you’ve been trying to drill home all year.

It’s probably too late to fix SEO. It’s too risky to run major tests on your landing pages and cart when the shopping season is peaking. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have work to do.

What the business needs to understand is what they left on the table. And it needs to come from you. If it doesn’t, they are going to find out from someone else, and they’ll start looking for people to blame. But if you’re the one who marches in there and tells them that by de-prioritizing your initiatives this year, they left $12 million on the table, you’re in charge of the conversation, and you can show them the hard cost of their errors.

Show them the search volume they had no exposure to, but have a perfect product or service offering to satisfy. Show them the lift your competitors saw in traffic and sales. Show them the bounce rates on your key landing pages. Show them the low average items per cart that should have been increased through effective cross-selling. Walk them through each funnel position in the cart process and outline why people exited the process. Show them all of the things you would have done to correct these issues, and when you tried to start.

You wanted executive buy-in? You got it.

Did you know that it took until 1989 for chunky tomato pasta sauce to come out? A guy by the name of Howard Moskowitz cracked this code for the Prego brand while they were trying desperately to defeat Ragu, the champion of pasta sauce at the time. Until then, companies were looking for the “perfect” pasta sauce, much like we seek the “perfect” architecture, interface, product photography, shopping cart, landing page, etc. It was Howard who pointed out that they shouldn’t be looking for the perfect sauce; they needed to be looking for the perfect sauces.

And he was right. By focusing on the right sauces for 3 distinct audience segments (plain, spicy and extra chunky), Prego handed Ragu their asses, making $600 million off of the chunky stuff, alone.

Malcolm Gladwell At TED 2004

I heard all of this in a Malcolm Gladwell’s TED talk from 2004, and it struck me as immediately applicable to the search industry and internet marketing, in general. We spend a lot of time, resources and arguments trying to figure out the right solution for everybody. And in SEO, we do so grossly, but differently.

What’s funny about SEO is that we do the market research ahead of time. We know the array of keywords. We can bucket those keywords into segments. We know what people are looking for. But then we run into a problem. We try to make everyone eat the same pasta sauce.

After the keyword research is done, we have to figure out where to put all of those valuable phrases, and that’s where the problem is. We start peeling the adhesive backing off of our keywords and we stick them to the pages where they best fit. We use them in pre-existing experiences. In pre-existing content. So yes, we’ve listened to the audience, but we’ve had to pick one page or a small few and we work to to fit all of these people and their varied interests into them.

Let me offer an interesting example. On this gift idea page on Saks Fifth Avenue, the title tag reads:

“Gifts for Women, Men, Kids & Home | Holiday, Special Occasion, Wedding, more – Saks.com”

Wow, that’s a lot of work for one page. But look at the left-hand navigation for this page. Hey, there is a page just for men’s gifts. And another one for women. And one for wedding, kids, and housewarming. And strangely, not one for special occasion (if it was worth putting in the title, it’s probably worth a page of its own). So, if there is a page for wedding gifts, why does wedding get lumped in on the main page? I don’t see any wedding gifts on that page. Why add a click? And when you get to the wedding page, the title tag is:

“Wedding – Shop by Occasion – Saks.com”

Wait. Now there aren’t any gifts mentioned? Shouldn’t this include wedding gifts, wedding gift ideas, shop for wedding gifts, something like that?

What really troubles me about this is that Saks actually went to the trouble to make the extra chunky sauce. They didn’t put all of the gifts all on one page and make people scroll aimlessly to find a gift. They segmented their audience and made a wedding gift page, but in their SEO, they serve everyone “pasta sauce”… the generic gift page, regardless of what they ask for. They have bottles of the flavor you want behind the counter, but you have to ask a second time.

So, Saks is actually a lot better off than most sites. The hard work is done; they just need to get their keywords in the right place. But for most sites, they just develop one, regular sauce and try to pump all sorts of visitors down the same funnel.

SEO makes site development easier, not harder. There should never be any question about what needs to be made, expanded, or edited when you have the research to show what people are looking for. We need to stop pasting keywords on content that “sort of works,” and start creating content, interfaces, and architectures that do. And we can’t just depend on keyword research to do that, either. We have to study behavior, too. As Gladwell points out, people don’t always know what they want, but they will always demonstrate what they want. Look at behavior in addition to search demand to see if there is something they want, but are unable to express in search.

Prego made over half a billion dollars serving a segment that was hungry, and history is repeating itself all over again online. Are you and a competitor trying to stuff everyone down the same funnel? Whichever of you decides to break it into segments and serve them more explicitly will undoubtedly have a much brighter future.

In a September 15 post, What Shape is Your Funnel?, (go ahead, open it in a new window and feast on this mental treat) Seth explains a critical, but often ignored concept in marketing of all types—he challenges the conventional marketing idea of putting more customers in the top of the funnel and asks, for a second, is your funnel crappy? I think it’s particularly relevant in online marketing, where we are paying for every little exposure to our future raving fans.

Yes, your funnel is crappy.

Oh, you’re a Fortune 500 company? You’ve won a design award with your site? Congratulations, your funnel is probably even crappier. No, I’m not kidding.

Funnel crappiness (FC) is a disease caused by unfriendly debate, wild guesses, nephews that do SEO, and untamed bureaucracy, and affects many adults, even if they aren’t aware of their symptoms. FC is highly contagious, and can infect new companies if carriers of FC migrate from previous partners. If you think you or your company may have FC, there is help. FC can be cured, but side-effects are not mild.

Web analytics, if taken daily and used in conjunction with a healthy dose of reality, can completely alleviate FC and make an enormous impact on your company culture, productivity, and profitability. Let’s look at the three things good analytics will help you do, each of which eradicates FC.

Turn Down The Burner On Tactical Arguments

The first thing you’re going to do with analytics is find the places where your site (or marketing sucks), and brainstorm the solutions. Web analytics can and should be a great moderator when people of different (or even the same) disciplines have a disagreement about how to identify and handle a problem or improve something. Often, we approach the same problems from different perspectives—many of which feel that more traffic is the only (or first) answer—and the data and understanding that a good web analytics person brings to the table will help.

It’s important to recognize both the data and the understanding. The effective analyst will be gathering information from a number of places, but their method will be to scrutinize everything around central business goals, rather than tactical purposes.

A great example is a hypothetical site that has both ecommerce and advertising: these two separate goals will actually do direct harm to each other. The heads of these efforts both want to maximize their particular contribution, and often can’t understand or accept that a plus on their side means a minus somewhere else. The analyst will approach this problem from the perspective of the business, where user experience and ultimately cash flow will help everyone make the right choice, and accept the reasoning.

Improve Your Operations

One of the bigger operational issues on a site is the ordering and execution of IT tasks. Good projects get held up because other fixes and issues are taking a long time to complete. Critical site updates and bug fixes are stuck in the pipe behind nearly-valueless site functionality additions. Or the executive team will pull a Medusa on you, turning the organization into stone while IT has to get something done at a Nascar pit crew pace. These types of things happen all the time, and they’re refreshingly preventable.

An effective web analytics team can help the IT team order, execute and explain the methods to IT’s madness to the organization when there are disputes about how work is getting done. The real-world or potential impact of changes can be gauged and compared between projects, and specific use cases or issues can be delivered to IT to help them understand the scope and nature of issues (particularly if you have a solution like Tealeaf).

Besides ordering IT tickets, analytics has myriad other operational arrows in its quiver that are harder to implement, but incredibly potent. If web analytics can gain the attention of the COO, they can report on how teams collaborate on work, what knowledge gaps need to be filled, where organizational sticking and leak points are and can help solve debates between teams from an objective perspective. Unfortunately, today that’s a big if.

Help The People Upstairs Write Checks

It should be obvious, but it needs to be said: your web analytics organization should be an active part of the CFO’s life. When people are requesting budgets, extensions, or resources, they should be leveraging the web analytics team as much as possible to demonstrate their case in irrefutable terms. Likewise, the CFO should be interacting with the team directly to help prioritize ventures, not just in terms of strict ROI (which would put social media straight into the toilet), but qualitatively as well.

A good team will build the business cases for your portfolio of efforts, will measure and monitor execution, will help pass out the rewards after it’s all done, and will help get the next cycle of ideas rolling.

So: Do You Suffer From Funnel Crappiness?

If you think you may have funnel crappiness, don’t let it take over. Find out where things are broken, work to fix them, and pay attention to how you do everything. Hire an agency or consultant if need be, but just get going.

This issue infests your company culture, your productivity and your profitability, and it can be solved. And the great thing is that when you solve it, or even if you just try, it inspires the company in big ways. The days of, “every company has problems,” will turn into, “my company cares,” and if you have any doubt about what that means in terms of business, give Sergey Brin a call.