Last week, I had the pleasure of attending SES, the Search Engine Strategies conference here in NYC. Like many events focused on search lately, a lot of attention was on social media. But I’m not going to talk about that. Rather, this post is on the less-sexy topic of metrics and analytics.

SES has been a great platform for new product or feature announcements. Last year Google used SES to launch the new and much improved Adwords interface. This year, they used it to announce Adwords Search Funnels, which provides greater insight into conversion tracking within Adwords itself, and improvements to Google Analytics Advanced Table Filters, which gives greater flexibility in segmenting and analyzing data. Bing was there too and they demoed some pretty cool stuff by integrating Bing Maps with Foursquare. But that’s about social media, so I’m not going there.

One feature Google didn’t mention, or I didn’t catch at the time, was the expansion of Goals within Analytics. I’m aware that the number of Goals increased from 4 to 20 late last year but that change never made its way into Custom Reporting—that is until last week. So why is this important? Well let’s start with the basics.

What is a Goal and why use them? Simply put, Goals allow you track conversions on your site. Every website has a purpose. Whether it’s lead generation, fulfilling transactions, or just providing informative content, there’s a place for Goals and the metrics they provide that help measure user interaction and overall site performance. Basic traffic stats such as visits, unique visitors and bounce rates are important, but can only tell you so much. For example, an ecommerce site can get tons of traffic, but without conversion data what good is it? With Goals you can track conversions and further analyze paths through the Funnel Visualization function, seeing user progression through sales funnels and where they abandon. This helps you identify trouble areas on your site and opportunities to further optimize and improve.

For SEOs this is invaluable, showing not only conversions from organic search traffic but also conversions down to the exact keywords used by visitors. More effort can then be spent optimizing around those important keywords likely to convert rather than those that don’t. Custom Reporting allows you to take things a step further and be extremely flexible in configuring data.

Again, up until last week the number of Goals in Custom Reporting was limited to 4. This is unfortunate if you have multiple Goals to track. One way around this was to create multiple profiles, which can be a pain when going back and forth between profiles. You also had to be mindful about how you organized your Goals. Those 4 Goals that could be pulled into a custom report are actually Goal Sets. You can have up to 5 specific Goals within a Goal Set, thus the 20 Goals total. The conversion count would be the combined total of whatever 5 Goals were defined within that Goal Set. Sound confusing? Yeah it can be.

Luckily, now Custom Reports can be made specific to each of the 20 Goals. This provides much more flexibility when setting up and organizing Goals, not to mention far more convenient than going back and forth between profiles.

As my colleague Josh Blair mentioned in an earlier post, Flighpath was at SMX East here in New York City. With a slightly different perspective than Josh, going to SMX allows me to recharge and learn about emerging methodologies, share insights with my peers and hopefully learn about the latest from the big three. Here are 3 things that stuck with me now that the show is over.

1. PageRank sculping and nofollow

The first session I attended, moderated by Danny Sullivan, discussed the usefulness of nofollow for the purposes of PageRank sculpting—especially considering the somewhat recent announcement from Google regarding this particular tag.

Back in June, Matt Cutts announced that nofollow does not suppress link-juice, and hasn’t for the past year or so. What has this done to PageRank sculpting? Well a lot. In many ways it defeated the whole purpose.

For those not familiar with PageRank sculpting, it’s an SEO technique used to pass link popularity to priority pages within a site. Every page has only so much PageRank and the amount of link value passed on to other pages is equally divided through each link on that page. So, in order to redirect more link-juice to pages with more ranking priority, the less important links could be suppressed by using rel="nofollow".

And how has this affected websites? Well for smaller sites, PageRank sculpting probably has very little to no affect. But for larger ones such as Zappos.com? Well let’s just say that Adam Audette, President of AudetteMedia, announced that Zappos.com will stop using nofollow altogether.

Rand Fishkin, of SEOmoz, however still sees the value of nofollow. For pages you absolutely want to get indexed and thereby help with their overall ranking, nofollow can still be very useful to help prioritize these pages. He has a point.

2. Cross-domain canonicalization

This may not mean a whole lot to many, but why is this important? Well for those managing multiple domains with duplicate content, it means plenty.

Many sites by themselves have duplicate content. Yours too and you don’t even know it. Sites using dynamic URLs come across this problem often. For example, http://example.com/page.html could have the exact same content as http://example.com/page.html?trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678. In this case rel="canonical" should be used to consolidate link popularity.

Currently this isn’t possible across domains. However, during one of the sessions, featuring software engineers from Google, Yahoo and Bing, Joachim Kupke of Google announced that very soon Google will honor the canonical tag across domains. This resulted in a very nerdy cheer from crowd, me included. We manage hundreds of domains for some of our clients, some with similar if not identical content. This new rule will allow us to minimize unnecessary page competition throughout many of these domains.

3. Social media and attribution

Attribution came up more than a few times. Not only across media type, but also down to the campaign, keyword and query levels. The ability to get that granular and really know what works and what doesn’t makes our lives easier. I’m still enjoying Google’s new (well, actually it was released in March) Adwords interface. With the old interface, actual queries for broad match keywords were not available, at least not within Adwords. We couldn’t see the exact terms people were typing into Google. Now we can, and more importantly, we know whether or not those queries are converting.

So what does attribution have to do with social media? Well social media received a lot of attention at the show. As it should. Many organizations are using it in very useful and creative ways to help build and maintain their brands. But in certain organizations, especially in the B2B world, where marketing initiatives live and die through lead source data and ROI, questions are raised about how to quantify its value. 

Many tools that measure buzz volume, sentiment, etc. are great and convenient solutions for providing an aggregate view of online chatter. These tools are invaluable for reputation management, which can have a direct impact on sales. But it’s that direct correlation between social media and sales that seems to be the problem, or lack there of. There’s no tool to measure this, at least not the way we can with a paid search campaign. We do know however that a social media presence can drive more traffic to your site. And that social media sites are good for link-juice, thereby helping to increase your search rank. For now we just have to do the extra work to monitor this data. Is it really so hard to track traffic source? That or we’ll just have to see how Facebook ads pan out.

So there’s my take on this year’s SMX East.