SES London 2013 - my talk on meaningful SEO metrics

1. Meaningful SEO
metrics
Will Critchlow
Distilled
www.distilled.net
London| 18–21 February

2. London| 18–21 February 2013 | #SESLON

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LTV
Lifetime Value

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Revenue
Customers

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Designed to
recognise the
ways a
customer is
worth more
than their first
purchase

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ROI
Return on Investment

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Total profit
Total campaign costs

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Designed to
measure the
effectiveness
of a campaign

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CPA
Cost Per Acquisition

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Total campaign costs
Number of conversions

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Designed to
compare the
costs of
different
channels

12. They are all broken or
hard to measure for SEO

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LTV
Lifetime Value

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Pitfall:
Easy to
double-
count

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Analytics packages don’t
track people, they track
cookies

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ROI
Return on Investment

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Pitfall:
Assumes
costs scale
with success

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Would you rather:
Spend $1, make $1,000
or
Spend $100, make $2,000

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No easy way to spend
even $100 on this

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CPA
Cost Per Acquisition

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Pitfalls:
Hard to get fully-loaded cost

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SEO:
should development
costs be included?

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Pitfall:
Assumes
costs scale
with success

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There is no one metric

25. My process

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Understand how the
business makes money

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Build a simple model

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Remember:
The best metrics
guide behaviour
KPIs guide executive behaviour: this is doing fine - go
think about something else

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Campaigns have two
failure modes
We don’t do what we wanted to What we do doesn’t work well
blog posts shipped, contacts not enough people read our
made, pages updated, posts, too many people ignore
development tickets completed our emails, bugfixes don’t move
the needle

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Measure
ACTIVITY & OUTCOMES

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Only worry about costs
sometimes
Always consider the margin on an incremental sale

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Make up estimate
numbers you don’t know

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Here’s an example
output for DistilledU

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…with actuals

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Measure something
Even before there are any outputs to measure

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Read
the lean
startup
And check out Dave
McClure on AARRR
metrics

37. Build two metrics packs

38. Build a KPI pack
Total LTV by channel, %growth, YoY traffic and revenue growth, 2+ year
forecasts

39. Build a project steering
pack
e.g. …

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Outreach
Total new contacts attempted, responses, successful outcomes

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Conversion Rate
Optimisation
Tests run, traffic to each variation, conversions for each variation,
number of successful tests run, total improvement in conversion rate

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User satisfaction
% of signups who upgrade to paid, % of engaged users, churn rates

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Focus on cohorts

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Focus on cohorts

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Focus on cohorts

46. Will Critchlow
Founder, Distilled
will.critchlow@distilled.net
@willcritchlow

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Image credits
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mharvey75/374461497/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/anned/6916165944/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsmagic/5848849468/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/59937401@N07/5929622407/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/drew_anywhere/3736287440/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/dunechaser/125929149/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/madison_guy/6075857102/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mk1971/1348204498/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/abbyladybug/1253054966/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sportsandsocial/2944659915/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chickpokipsie/6785991390/in/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rhinoneal/5633001128/ photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chmoss/4142167488/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/cristiano_betta/2119577657/