Kansas City SEO and SEM » Analytics is NOT Integrated!

by: Anne Haynes

In the SEM world you can’t know everything and while I claim to be on the cutting edge, my colleagues keep me up to speed on the industry and how to better increase conversions for clients.

Today, I had a demo with Voicestar and wow this technology was really cool. The service generates local and 800 numbers for a Web site, print advertisement, rich media advertisement, and pay-per-click. Google tested out click-to-call back in 2005 and yardley.ca blogged about it first (within my quick search) and now all that is left is a message from Dean Collins.

While the service looks awesome and goes full circle with different media channels, the pricing and analytics integration is labor intensive. Pricing this service for clients will be tough especially if a client already has a local or 800 number on their Web site. There is a five day lead time to integrate this number into the Voicestar system and from a client perspective five days is too long. Additionally, if anyone has worked with telecommunications service providers and paperwork, five days can really be six or seven.

From an analytics perspective, all services offer their own analytics through their custom CRM systems. When will vendors and technology providers understand that flexible tracking is essential to sales within the Internet industry? Set-up is one thing, but normalizing the analytics data is extremely labor intensive, making conclusions and recommendations with several sources in another.

There is a reason why Interactive Agencies will always have a place in the Internet industry. Agencies’ are the only place where everything ties together; Thank you Google, Yahoo! and MSN for pay-per-click analytics, Thank you PR Web for providing analytics, Thank You Voicestar for providing analytics, Thank you Burst Media for providing analytics, Thank you Kintera Sphere for providing analytics, but when will there be a product enhancement to integrate every service providers’ analytics? Every service out there provides analytics and I just want 1 FEED.

Bottom-line, Agencies’ have no problem with building relationships, but when will technology providers streamline analytics? There is labor in everything; talking to clients, talking to internal staff, talking to vendors, it just goes on and on and in order to do things “right” without over inflating costs, agencies need technology that support the needs of their clients.

On the Voicestar note, they have cool analytics ;check out this tie into all media marketing channels. But really, notice that PPC is not a shoe-in. In my professional opinion, Voicestar must be used on a Web site (hopefully organic optimized pages) and/or within print to be effective.

While I think I’m dead on here, let me know what you think. I would enjoy thoughts on this topic, especially if you work for an agency.