For years now, the success of online traffic sources has relied solely on the principle that the ‘last click wins’. This has been a major flaw in web analytics as customer journeys are often a lot more drawn out and complex that just one visit. In fact, leading web analytics company DC Storm, found that 70% of all sales consist of more than one traffic source.
Their research in December 2008 also revealed that there’s an average of 3.36 visits per sale. When creating reports and performing analysis, the winning emphasis is often solely with those last clicks, and so the remaining 70% are effectively ignored. But in reality, that 70% play a vital role in the customer journey and that ever important final conversion event.
I recently told a friend of mine who is a journalist that I was doing online PR. “Ah”, she said, “you’ve become the enemy!” We had a good old giggle, but this illustrates perfectly the love-hate relationship journalists have with PRs and why it is such a challenge for us PRs to pitch to them.
Over recent weeks, the SEO community has been commenting furiously at Matt Cutts’ revelations on the relationship between nofollow attributes and PageRank sculpting with regard to SEO strategy. At the SMX conference, Cutts proclaimed the notion that sculpting internal link structure using the rel=nofollow attribute causes PageRank to evaporate.