A Few Quick Thoughts from Search Engines Strategies San Jose 2007

I was able to sneak out of the office this week to attend a few sessions at the Search Engines Strategy conference held in San Jose this week. Here are a few thoughts from some of the sessions I attended:

• Matt Bailey of Site Logic gave a hilarious introduction to the importance of segmentation when looking at web analytics data. Taking Star Trek (original series) as his source of data, he demonstrated the survival rates of red shirt characters when beaming down to the planet with Captain Kirk, segmenting between times when Kirk did and did not make a love connection with a female alien.

  (Author confession: Yes I like Star Trek, but no I don’t own any pointed Vulcan ears). You can read his full post on the topic in the ClickTracks articles.

  Takeaways: Segment your data when possible to make comparisons, contrast different segments to gain insights, and always view your data in context. I also asked Matt how small businesses should prioritize areas to optimize. He stated that merchants should focus first on their most profitable products and not the most or least converting as improvement to those have the greatest potential to your net profits.

• Allan Dick, senior plumbing evangelist (not making that up) for Vintage Tub & Bath, was the moderator of the same session and he answered the same question I asked Matt. Allan said that as a small business, they try to focus on key products (in their case claw foot bathtubs) and when buyers purchase those, they also likely purchase all of the hardware that matches the tub. In this way, they can focus efforts around optimizing for these core products and once buyers come and purchase, they also tend to buy related accessories.

  Allan also suggested focusing on fewer overall metrics that mean something to him (i.e. they spur him to action if changing by a certain percentage) rather than focusing on 30 metrics that you aren’t sure what they mean.

  Takeaways: Start with your core products and put your efforts there. Once you get the traffic, you can then ensure you are merchandising and cross-selling to boost your average order size. Also, read some of the interviews found by searching for “Allan Dick”. Allan began implementing what he learned at SES shows years back and that knowledge has helped grow the business to an Internet Retailer top 500 business. SEO is certainly more complex these days, but his story is proof that the effort to learn and network can pay off for small businesses.

Even if you can’t step away from your business long enough to attend such a conference, there are a ton of bloggers covering these sessions so I would recommend taking advantage of those topics where you want to learn more. Search Engine Land has a roundup of all the coverage for day 2 and other days at SES.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business