Avinash Kaushik - Search Engine Strategies conference 2012

I attended the SES in Toronto this month and I did learn some nuggets of wisdom from Avinash Kaushik, Google's digital marketing evangelist, who was the keynote and gave a very animated presentation. He pointed out some obvious mistakes Rogers, Canadian Tire, Expedia, Calvin Klein, the Bay and the Toronto Star are doing online. And by defacto pointed out that TD Bank - one of the top 5, can't be found on some basic keywords like property loan, student loan or best bank for foreign exchange. So its not just about what you are doing - its also about what you aren't doing.

• "Do not make the world unhappy" Avinash pleads - fix your sites; check your bounce rates and fix the pages people are bouncing from. Also if your site doesn't load in two seconds fix it. He said Calvin Klein's was very slow to load because it was loading images in Flash.
• "Every time you use Flash a puppy dies" claims Avinash.

The three things you should consider when looking at metrics are:

• Acquiring traffic - look at your entrance pages and unique visits
• Behaviour - what did visitors do - check your bounce rate (daily) and enter/exit pages
• Outcome/value - what was the conversion rate? who purchased, downloaded, called?

Another piece of advice was around questionnaires - Rogers has a 37 questionnaire on their site - really. He said there is only three things you need to ask:

• Why are you here?
• Do you want to buy something?
• Were you able to complete your task?

He also cautions to beware of "Data puking" - too much of the wrong data just wastes time.
He ended with "Expect more" from our own websites and from others.