Search Marketing Sage

Multi-Channel Attribution is a pretty big topic in our industry, and most of us aren’t as knowledgeable as we would like to be on the subject. Attribution modeling attempts to solve the problem of which channel gets credit when a user touches multiple channels prior to converting. The problem with attribution models historically has been that they segment attributes at the single channel level: paid search, social media, direct traffic, organic search, etc., and often lack the ability to simultaneously compare various models across a multi-channel format.

For a while now, I have told all of my clients that they should set up Google Authorship and link their Google+ page with their blog or online publication. Authorship markup and other rich markup and schema is a way to be competitive in the search space. Not everyone has jumped for joy at the idea that their face could be seen within search results, but most thought it was a pretty great idea. Images in search results can really draw the eye away from other results and consequently, improve the click-through on that search result.

Authorship Markup is Google’s way of attributing content back to its author. Google is displaying author information in search results and can be set up by following an option listed here or by using a blog plugin. There are a variety of ways to make this happen, but all include making a connection from your Google+ page to content you publish and making the connection back from content you publish to your Google+ page. It’s exciting to see your face show in search results. At least in my opinion!

Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) has a new Lab called Author Stats. Author Stats is a page in WMT that “shows search statistics for pages  for which you are the verified author.” This requires that you log into WMT with the email you used to verify the account. I use a different one for Search Mojo, so I had to add my personal email to the account to have any data display for me. If you are in charge of managing a blog with multiple authors, this means that you will not be able to receive information on all the author’s Author Stats.

Within Author Stats, you can see each page Google has associated with you. Each post displays how many impressions and clicks you received, in addition to the click-through-rate and average position. All of these columns are able to be sorted, so you can sort to see which post ranked highest, for instance. The post I wrote that had the most clicks was a very hot topic during the Olympics this year. This data provides insight that should influence your content marketing efforts.

Have you tried out the Author Stats lab yet? What do you think? In my opinion, there is a lot of value associated with knowing the performance of author data in search results. I’d love to see the comparison between click-through data when my image was displaying, when just the “by Sarah Lokitis” line was showing, and when nothing related to authorship displayed! Hear that suggestion, Google?! Thanks for working on that! I’d love to hear your thoughts too, so please comment below or find me on Twitter @Lokitis.

The Hardcore Analytics session discussed new and different ways to use your Analytics data to make better decisions and improve performance.

Conrad Saam, VP of Marketing, Urbanspoon (@conradsaam)

Conrad Saam brings experience from an in-house perspective, currently with Urbanspoon, and discusses how to translate what we do into useful information for MBA-types.

Kicking off this year’s SMX Advanced conference here in rainy Seattle, is a session on The Periodic Table of SEO, the 2012 Edition. (Periodic Table of SEO).

In this session, several reputable speakers walk us through some of the new ranking factors we’ll need to be paying attention to in the near future. Here’s what they had to say.

Chris Silver Smith, President, Argent Media (@si1very)

Quality score is becoming a major factor even in organic rankings this day in age, bringing page speed and the like into the equation as an influence on rankings. On the same topic, Chris says Google is looking to find a way to quantify whether a site is trustworthy or not. Some possible signals could be things like:

The Search Mojo marketing team and I are out in San Francisco this week attending and exhibiting at the Marketo User Summit. There are several sessions here that the team and I will blog about, because they directly relate to search and search measurement. The first session I covered today was “Are You Getting The Most Out Of Google Analytics?”, featuring Adam Singer, now with Google’s Analytics division and formerly with Lewis PR and Top Rank Marketing.