The Marketleap Report
Volume III, Issue #6, June 26, 2003

Use IRTA to Measure Search Engine Marketing Success
by Keith Boswell

There's always discussion in the search marketing world about how to define success. Derrick Wheeler, VP of Search Engine Marketing for Marketleap, came up with an acronym several years ago to help marketers understand exactly what they should be measuring to define success. He calls it simply, IRTA.

Indexing, Ranking, Traffic, and Action collectively help gauge the progression and success of your search engine marketing efforts. Too many marketers focus on rankings alone, thinking that high rankings will generate business. You wouldn't buy a car in a car lot just because it's parked closest to you. When you use the four-step IRTA process, you are able to see at what stage changes need to be made to maximize your search marketing goals.

Indexing - Are your pages getting in?
If you could have more than one listing in the phone book for all of the products and services you offer, you would. Indexing is very similar. It's the way that search engines include pages in their database and is the starting point for evaluating overall search marketing performance. Depending on how your site is built and the value it provides to an audience, the search engines might index one of your pages, or they might index thousands of them.

If your website has two-thousand pages, but only ten of them are indexed, only .5% of your website is available to people searching. The more pages you have indexed, the more keywords you can compete for. If 100% of your website is indexed, these pages represent hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to be found. Pages can't rank in search results if they aren't indexed!

Ranking - It's not just about being first
Ranking has been a primary area of focus for so many marketers because it was the easiest and most obvious way to gauge success. But a high ranking for a particular phrase doesn't necessarily mean more sales or even that people will click through to your site. If you try to analyze your rankings for every possible keyword combination, it's overwhelming because of the wide variety of phrases that people will use when they are searching.

Tracking a reasonable sample of your most important (highly relevant, highly competitive, and/or high ROI) keyword phrases is where to focus when assessing your search engine rankings. Pages of your website that don't rank well for the keywords you are tracking can still have high rankings for terms you didn't expect and generate qualified visitors.

Traffic - Where is your traffic coming from?
How much traffic are search engines generating for your website? Marketers use analysis programs like Web Trends to sort through the log files of their websites. They help dissect the raw data that is generated and show you the most valuable reports for search marketing - referral data for traffic and keywords.

If search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN, HotBot, and LookSmart are showing up in your referral data, you can see exactly how much traffic each of these engines is sending to your website. You can also see which keywords people are searching for to find your website. In order to answer questions about ways to improve your search marketing, it's critical to know where your traffic is coming from and what keyword phrases are generating traffic for your website.

Action - Make the sale
Your site is well indexed, ranking fine, generating qualified traffic, but not selling. The search engines aren't your problem. Your problem is most likely the pages people see after clicking on a link from a search engine. If search engines have more than just your home page indexed, people can be entering your website from a variety of points.

If the page design they land on does not consider the desired actions that a user should take, don't be surprised if they aren't acting the way you want them to. Are you trying to sell more products and services? Do you want them to read more information about your products? Do you want them to sign up for a newsletter or sign up to be contacted by your sales team? If your first three steps of IRTA are covered; don't forget to close the deal. This is critical to rounding out success.

If you want to run a successful search marketing campaign, use IRTA. You'll see that by following IRTA's four principles, your online business will grow through search marketing. You'll receive more of the results you're looking for, and be able to recognize which stage of your marketing efforts need help to generate new business from search engines.