THS Articles

A Web Host's One-Two Punch: Search Engine Marketing & ROI Tracking

By Shari Thurow and Grant Crowell

In addition, Web hosting companies who offer this inexpensive service often use automated software to accomplish this task. Many search engines consider automated submissions to be spam, and they will ignore the submission.

The best way to submit a site to the spider-based search engines is to submit a home page and a site map (as a back up) to the free URL submission form, and let the search engine find pages on its own.

In fact, many Web hosts and developers commonly overlook the importance of a site map. "Hosts and developers who do not incorporate a site map, the critical building block for internal link structure, are building a site with invisible ink and failing to provide the crawlers with the decoder," states John Lustina, co-founder of Intrapromote, a national search engine marketing firm.

Perhaps the biggest mistake Web hosting companies make is to not include ROI tracking in their hosting packages.

"Web site analytics provide a critical feedback loop for search engine marketing," says Peter Hershberg, Managing Partner and co-founder of Reprise Media, a New York and San Francisco-based search engine marketing firm. "They can help you understand how people currently find your site, and can indicate obvious holes in your search engine marketing campaign."

"As an example, consider a registration-based site," continues Hershberg. "A good Web analytics package can give you insight into roadblocks along the registration process. For instance, you might find that a majority of your users are abandoning the registration form because they don't know whether they can receive HTML emails. A simple change, but one you wouldn't know to make without that level of insight."

As both a designer and a search engine marketer, I would never recommend a hosting company to our clients unless the hosting company offered a comprehensive site statistics package. Reason? If Web site owners plan to generate sales leads or actual sales from their sites, they need to know exactly how the sites are performing in order to improve them. Without good ROI tracking, Web site owners will have a difficult time measuring the effectiveness of their sites.

Even the major search engines offer ROI tracking. "By offering marketing conversion tools," says Marshall, "Google and Overture have raised the bar on measurable online marketing success: customers must justify marketing and Web site expenditure."

If you cannot offer a proper Web analytics package, make log files easily available. Make how-to and download information readily available in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), Help, or Customer Service section of your site.

Web hosts can get a profitable one-two punch by offering both search engine marketing and ROI tracking.

"Online businesses do not spend their analytics budget with their hosting company," explains Marshall. "Hosting companies are missing out on a market estimated at $400 million per year. When you see a company spend $50 on a hosting package but more than that ($250 and up) on their Web analytics software alone, you can tell that they're missing out on a good opportunity."

Hit counters vs. Web analytics software
Some Web hosting companies offer free hit counters to their clients. Hit counters generally measure and display the number of hits on a single Web page. Unfortunately, the word "hit" is still somewhat deceptive.