Topics instead of keywords: New feature in tracking software

[wolfadeus]

I am currently working on a new tracking feature for a in-house tracking program: Most of our clients are ways too keen on specific keywords; more useful, in our experience, is the tracking of "topics".

So we implement topics now that can be individually defined. For example, a hotel in London would define the topice "location", and this would track all SE referrals that included keywords with "central, kensington, london". Or "sightseeing" with "tower, bucking, palace, museum, sightsee, attract" and so on.

A "NOT" operator tag will block unwanted keywords for a topic, typically the name of the company (because that would include the people that specifically look for the company and not for the content the website offers).

Do you know of tracking programs that allow such things already? If so, what is your experience with them? Do you think this is going to be useful?

All thoughts and opinions are appreciated!

[cgrantski]

I KNOW this is really useful and have been using it for about a year now. In the pay-per-click world, it's kinda similar to Campaigns or Ad Groups or whatever the PPC provider offers to keep your paid keywords organized by topic (assuming you use that approach of subdividing your keywords and assuming you have set up your destination URLs so they contain the Campaign or Ad Group name). In natural search, we create reporting filters to divide visits into the topic groups. In all cases, we track the outcomes i.e. the value or quality of the resulting visits, as well as whether the visitors tend to come back for another visit. Doing this has definitely made SEM and SEO efforts more productive without the agony of looking at individual words. Go for it, it's worth the effort.

An extension of this is to look at the (effectiveness of) landing pages for each group. Sometimes a switch of landing page is what's needed.

As for tools to do it, we just use our regular analytics program (WebTrends).