frostlorraine - 3:31 pm on Jul 11, 2002 (gmt 0)

I am wondering what specific techniques, if any, are being employed by SEO professionals on this board to track SEO ROI in a *completely* closed-loop fashion. I do SEO work professionally, and my current method for measuring campaign ROI involves analyzing log files to determine whether, and what amount of traffic is coming in on the keywords that I optimized the site for, and correlating this data roughly with independent sales data (from the client). This way I can say, for example, "search referals increased by 20% and so did sales in July."

But, now, since many of my clients have become accustomed to this from doing PPC campaigns on Overture, using tracking URLs, I am being asked to track ROI much more tightly, which would necesitate me tracking all the way from the search engine referal to the conversion. In other words, my clients want me to tell them, for instance, Google delivered 1000 uniques in July for some keyword, say, "ailrines pilot" and that of those uniques, 50 converted to purchasing a product (i.e. made it to a conversion landing page).

I find that it would be difficult to provide such data. And, as far as I can see WebTrends (which is what I use) doesn't faciliate this.

What can I do to execute this kind of closed-loop tracking?

Anything you can say to help me out would be great.

Thanks in advance,
Lorraine

[edited by: frostlorraine at 3:50 pm (utc) on July 11, 2002]