It's the end of the road for me and Web metrics

Well folks, this will be my final post for our search engine and Web optimization class at West Virginia University. It certainly has been the long and winding road that I thought it would be.

From Google Analytics and variables to variate testing and key words, the world of search engine optimization and Web metrics certainly is challenging. But, using both within your organization is critical. In the day and age of digital technology, consumers are in the driver's seat and it's up to us, as marketers, to listen to what they want and need. Web metrics allows us to do that. We can establish and create metrics that allow us to evaluate consumer behaviors, see what they are doing while they are on our site and how they are interacting with our site. Through the data we collect, we can make our sites more consumer-friendly, leading to overall success for our organizations.

But, as with any product or service, testing and re-testing is key to developing a Web presence that will give the customers what they want. The use of A/B testing and multivariate testing enables us to "try out" new ideas and designs to see what leads to greatest conversion rate -- the overall goal when bringing people to our site. As noted by many of the authors and presenters in the Google Analytics videos, it's sometimes easy to be so engaged in what you're doing that you assume you have the answer. In reality, what we think is great or what will work well isn't always viewed the same way by our customers.

The most important lesson learned for me is to get the right people in the right place on your team. Analytics and search engine optimization is not an easy subject to comprehend and implement. Bringing together a team of people who can help us "think" about what it is we want to collect, how we can implement it and then evaluate what we learn is absolutely vital to our team's success. While I understand the overall concepts and why we need to have this information, I continue to be fairly clueless about how to set up tests, establish parameters, etc. I need the right people to make that happen. And, we then have to take what we have learned and incorporate those ideas/changes into a platform that leads to our success.

So, this is the end of the SEO/web metrics highway. I appreciate all of the feedback, lessons learned and maps provided to me by the professor and my classmates, but I am certainly ready for another route. Next stop on the digital highway: Viral, Buzz and WOM. I wonder what that's all about?