2019 - Quantifying $EO Performance

Executives talk about money, so SEOs need to as well. Organic is one of the hardest channels to measure: search engines are inconsistent, many projects launch at once, and tracking is imperfect. This session shows how to quantify your contributions anyway.

You’ll start with practical ways to tie SEO work to dollars, such as KPI-to-dollar equivalents, conversion rates, BI joins, Search Analytics for Sheets, and Data Studio automation. Then you’ll learn to use Google’s CausalImpact library to estimate the causal effect of a change. It compares actual performance to a forecast built from a pre-period or last year’s data, and reports statistical significance and a 95% confidence interval. Real examples include computer-generated text (+22%), a meaningful XML sitemap (+33%), a chatbot (+78%), and an SPA migration (−51%). You’ll also learn “smoke performance testing,” which means quick, imperfect analyses that build a library of positive and negative case studies. Imperfect data is fine as long as you keep iterating.