The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

At Google’s offices in New York this Thursday, our own Max Kalehoff, co-moderated the SEMPO Data Stories Meetup with Dave Fall from Google, and Sara Holoubek, SEMPO’s NY chapter president.  The event was attended by over 200 search-marketing professionals and enthusiasts.

The evening began with an overview of exciting new developments in Google Analytics by Ari Paparo. Features presently in beta, including the ability to track Flash, an interface for creating custom segments, and multi-dimensional motion charts were covered.  We then proceeded to the main attraction of the evening.

Dani of Daniweb.com – a community for IT developers and technology enthusiasts, opened her Google Analytics and turned to the SEMPO audience to help tell a data story around her website.

While Dani’s website scores are high for SEO and she receives a few million unique visitors a month, her conversion rates are low. Dani walked us through her site, and her Google Analytics account, and then turned to the audience to both tell the data story and solve her current conversion challenge.

The Meetup audience asked to learn more about Daniweb.  Because Daniweb is an IT community, visitors looking to rapidly research and solve a programming problem often found Daniweb through search engines.  In fact 93% of Dani’s traffic comes from Search!  Once on Daniweb, visitors viewed 1.3 pages on average, but also left the community as soon as their code-related question was resolved, resulting in a high bounce rate of 86.4%.

The next series of questions from the audience were aimed at understanding how Dani was driving conversions on her site.  Because Daniweb is a community that generates revenue exclusively through online advertising, Dani defined a conversion as a completed visitor registration.  To drive conversion, Dani prompts visitors to register with the community a few seconds after arriving on her site.  After reviewing the registration form, which is presently a screen-takeover, the audience suggested that the form be integrated into the visitor’s response, so a visitor could simultaneously post a response in the community and register for Daniweb.com.
Additional suggestions included voting functionality to identify the best answers to questions on Daniweb, as well as semantic indexing of the forums’ content – something that would appeal to the technology community. 

As the suggestions kept pouring in, Sara volunteered to set up a page on Meetup (coming soon) where the audience could post additional ideas.  The evening concluded with animated suggestions of the next SEMPO Meetup venue.  Luxury cruise ship anyone?