Statistics

I haven't noticed a difference between blogspot.com and wordpress.com in the rankings but I haven't tried to do a concerted study on the topic.  It is worth buying your own domain name even if you host the blog at some free service (you can do it with both Blogger and Wordpress.com).  If you are confident, then host it on your own web host. The Linux ones that come with cPanel and Fantastico make it easy to install Wordpress with one click.

For example, do you test probabilities in order to determine marketing allocation spend? I don't have a lot of examples, because while I understand the basic theories of statistics (probability, regression, correllation, etc) I don't always know when to apply them, or how marketers in particular analyze their data from an objective standpoint (i.e. the data proves that women shopping in october spend more than men, but its dependent on a rather than b)  rather than subjective (i.e. it looks like women are shopping more than men, and there is a spike in activity in october, and it could be because the promotion we are running, or it could be x or y or z). I'm sorry I'm not being more specific, but this is the best I've got.

hey kathryn,

what kinds of statistics are you referring to? That may help frame the response a little better. I use lots of statistics, usually with macro-enabled Excel sheets, then again it depends on what specifically you are referring to.

BJ

I would be curious to hear how you would integrate an analytics platform into an excel spreadsheet.  Is there a way to enable both mediums to essentially "communicate" without having to do too much manual work?

Utilizing excel to do specific formulas I could see of benefit.

Is there a way to make this work?

Kathy,

I work on the SEO for a very large database site with millions of pages. The stats that I use are a bit basic though as funding wont allow use of proper programs. I use excel to match organic rankings with links that I have either bought or built.

I did at one point write a neat script that works with a web analytics app to define keywords that should be targetted by SEO and SEO keywords that should be targetted by SEM, that was a cute script but apart from the usual conversion rates and traffic values nothing very statistical.

But only today I was writing a list of paid links vs traffic and working out the value of the traffic vs cost of links. That was mildly amusing, but then tracking the value of SEO is always a tricky one because Google's algorithm is a bit mysterious sometimes, especially when you have LOTS of pages.

Hope that helps.

This is one area I need to do a better job on. Managing organic SEO is a bit hard to associate statistics in, however, I am sure there is something I could do.

Curious what other have to say on this topic.