Instead of using margin and volume to make your web analytics framework, It may be easier to build it out using a conversion funnel. The different steps of the funnel give you ideas and starting points for brainstorming the functions your site has. It also forces you to think through your marketing and web analytics strategy for each step of the customer acquisition cycle. The steps are awareness, consideration (desire, interest), conversion, loyalty and advocacy.
Each step has Key Performance Indicators and their associated targets and goal values. For some of the goal values you’ll have to determine internally, (Avinash’s post on this is rad) and other goal values are the Per Visit Values calculated by Google Analytics (dividing revenue by visits).

I like this kind of view because it puts into prospective where the majority of your advertising efforts are going. It’s easy to heavy up on everything leading up to the conversion and then forget about loyalty and advocacy, or vice-versa.

Keyword research is finding keywords with the right balance between relevance and popularity to use towards getting your web page more targeted visitors. Keywords that are very specific and relevant tend to have less competition and therefore, are easier to rank higher for. Broad and generic keywords are searched for more often and therefore, are more popular and harder to rank higher for.

The perfect keyword is somewhere in between – very relevant to your site and also a popular search query. How do you know when you have chosen the right keyword to use for optimizing on your site? You don’t. You’ll always have to wonder what the opportunity cost is for ranking for one word instead of a different word. It’s my opinion that you shouldn’t focus on any more than 3 keywords per page to try and rank. When you get past three you’re spreading your page thin. When doing keyword research I think its important to remember the end goal is more customers, not just more visitors. It makes more sense to me to have more pages that rank well for very relevant keywords rather than a couple pages that rank well for popular keywords.

One tricky part of SEO is figuring out which keywords should be used in your SEO strategy that you don’t know about. Tools like Rank Checker require you to know which keywords you want to rank well for before you can plug them into the tool and measure where your site ranks for them. But what if you don’t know what new keywords you should use to begin with?

Using Excel and Google Analytics, you can discover new keywords by comparing one time period to another in the keywords report. The end result is a list of keywords that were used for the first time between your two reporting periods. In Google Analytics go to Traffic Sources > Keywords. In the URL add &limit=50000 to the end of the URL and hit enter (the page will not display any differently, but when you export to a csv file, you will export 50,000 rows instead of 500). Export the report and then do the same thing with the previous month. Combine these two reports together then do some conditional formatting to highlight the duplicates in Excel. (To do this in excel 07, highlight the column, click on the conditional formatting button below the Home tab, then choose Highlight Cell Rules > Duplicate Values.)

The keywords that are not highlighted mean that they are not duplicates and were used for the first time between this reporting period and the last. Take this list of keywords and see what their potential is in popularity using Google’s Keyword Tool. Also look at outcome metrics from these keywords in Google Analytics to measure their potential – did they convert? What if you had a lot more traffic from these newly discovered keywords, what would that mean to the bottom line?

Here are a few ideas on getting the most out of Google Adword’s remarketing:

Remarketing to everyone who visits your site can be wasteful and expensive since there are a lot of visitors who bounced immediately after visiting. No matter how many ads they see they have no interest. You’re better off remarketing to those people who showed a higher level of interest by visiting multiple pages. To do this create a Custom Combination that includes tags from more than one page. In the New Custom Combination screen, select all audiences from one tag and then create another list that includes a separate tag.

Like in this example for a site that sells both women’s and kid’s products, this custom combination will include only people who have visited both a women’s page and visited a kid’s page, no bounces.

AdWords remarketing also allows for reactivation campaigns where you target people who have purchased in the past with a message to get them to come back and purchase again. Create a new remarketing list and click the Select From Existing Tags radio button. Whatever you call your conversion, or “action name” will show up. Select it, and give it a 90 day duration. Then make another remarketing list the same way but this time give it a 60 day duration. Then make a new custom combination where you select all of the 90 day audiance and none of the 60 day audience. This way you will retarget people who have purchased 90 to 60 days ago. The maximum membership duration for your cookie is 540 days, so if your product is a seasonal one, you could message past purchasers over a year after they purchased to remind its that time of year again to come back and buy.

Chances are most people who buy from your site, buy the same day they visit. So sending them a remarketing ad as soon as they leave can be a waste and is going to give your retargeting ads more than their fair share of credit. Waiting a day before showing them ads can help you weed out those people who would have come back and bought the same day anyway. Setting this up is just like the tip above but instead of using your conversion tag, use any of the tags you have set up on your site. Make the membership duration for one of them 1 day and then make a new custom combination that excludes all audiances from that 1 day list. Now your ads will show to people after one day has past.