Understanding Your Online Marketing:  An Account Manager’s Rhetorical Q & A (Part 2)

Apr 13, 2011 by Danielle Sullivan

Last week, Danielle discussed some PPC basics and how they impact your L2T performance report. In part two, she’ll continue to explain the meaning of all the charts, data, numbers, and graphs behind your online marketing reports.

SEO Basics

Q:  What does the active links section of my SEO report mean?
OR… I’ve been running SEO for the last 12 months.  Why does this report only show 200 active links to my site?  Shouldn’t I have more?

A:  As you’re likely aware, SEO is an ongoing battle. While the monthly ongoing work gains us lasting rankings, the links created are not always indefinite. This is why once you cease optimization work, within a few months you’ll notice your site dropping from the once gained rankings and losing organic search traffic. The links that are shown in your report are the links that Google recognizes as pointing back to your website from blogs, articles, press releases and other advanced linking strategies we perform at that moment.

Links created a year ago may exist on pages no longer supported by the hosting site or no longer recognized by search engines. Therefore, we continue building fresh links and relevant content each month to maintain a healthy number of active, quality links to your site!

Site Benchmarking: How your site really measures up to your neighbor’s

Q:  Is this [click-through-rate, average time on site, average pages per visit] considered good?

A:  For the Automotive industry, the average CTR for a PPC campaign is 1%, the average time on site is 2:27 minutes, and the average pages per visit are 2.8 pages.  If you’re above these, then yes, your site is competing with the best of them.  If not, then it should be discussed.  There is more often than not a simple answer such as making sure your ad copy displays a strong call to action and ensuring your site offers the best possible user experience.

Hopefully this has been useful and as always, if there are any questions, never hesitate to reach out to me or your dedicated Account Manager!