Going beyond “what happened” in SERP analytics Ray Grieselhuber DemandSphere @raygrieselhuber Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber

Intro Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber ● Founded DemandSphere in 2010 ● Two main products: DemandMetrics and SERP Intelligence ● We work with brands, ecommerce and programmatic teams, both in-house and agency ● Our expertise is using very large-scale SERP analytics to drive strategy

DemandMetrics SERP data analytics for expert SEO teams ● Millions of keywords monitored daily ● 10,000+ sites managed ● Rich customization capabilities ● Large-scale processing and turnkey data warehouses via BigQuery ● Built for complex org structures

Shopping Ads • Position (order of items) • Product Name • Price • URL • Pixel Data Organic Results • Organic Position • Visual Position • Title • Meta Description • Product URL • Pixel Data Popular Products • Position (order of items) • Product Name • Price • URL • Pixel Data SERP Intelligence - data pipelines to BigQuery The SERP Intelligence API is a data pipeline built to your specifications, covering any aspects of the SERP your BI team requires. These pipelines typically consist of tracking hundreds of features throughout various search engines. Results are stored as JSON files on our servers and loaded into BigQuery for clients to access. Ongoing support is provided to ensure data delivery is accurate and on time. Use the power of SQL and BigQuery to accelerate your insights from SERP data.

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber What? Why? Going beyond “what happened?”

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Traditional rank tracking monitors a small part of the SERP Up Down 23 12

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Search Console metrics are still “what happened?”

Old School SERPs (“Ten blue links”) Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

GSC metrics show a basic view of the “search funnel” Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Avg. Position (Max traffic potential) Impressions (depends on Avg. Pos.) Clicks CTR (clicks / impressions)

Half of GSC metrics are derived Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Avg. Position (Max traffic potential) Impressions (depends on Avg. Pos.) Clicks CTR (clicks / impressions) What happened? Derived metric What happened? Derived metric

The missing detail is factors that impact CTR Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Avg. Position (Max traffic potential) Impressions (depends on Avg. Pos.) Clicks CTR (clicks / impressions) What happened? Derived metric What happened? Derived metric WHY?!

Traditional Rank Tracking Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Metrics ● Rank ● Change ● Averages, position buckets, etc.

Modern SERP Features Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

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Share of Voice & SERP Features Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Metrics ● SERP Feature Appearance ● Presence ● Visual Share of Voice ● CTR Impact

Share of Voice & SERP Features Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Big data ● Detailed SERP Feature presence ● Top 20 market and domain / URL visibility analytics ● Forecasting and CTR modeling

Pixels = Attention Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

SGE Launch soon… Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber ● Google I/O rumors are unconfirmed ● SGE widget is not auto-expanded in early live tests ● Auto-expand is what will have the biggest impact on pixels and CTR

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber The anxiety over SGE is (largely) anxiety about pixels 1063px

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Bad news: SEOs already have pixel problems 816px

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Getting closer to why: pixel depth affects CTR

Pixels & Visual Rank Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Metrics ● Pixels from Top ● Pixel Height ● Visual Rank ● Scroll Depth

Pixels & CTR Impact Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

Daily layout changes on Google SERPs Paid Content ● Position (order of items) ● Product Name ● Price ● URL ● Pixel Data Organic Results ● Organic Position ● Visual Position ● Title ● Meta Description ● Product URL ● Pixel Data Popular Products ● Position (order of items) ● Product Name ● Price ● URL ● Pixel Data

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Rank tracking vs. SERP monitoring

Holistic SERP Monitoring Visual Rank Sentiment Layout Shift Scroll Depth Pixel Depth CTR Modeling Ad Copy Suggested Keywords # of Elements Ad Location Locations Reviews Merchant IDs Business Titles Ranking URLs Title, Meta, etc. Custom Extraction SERP Screenshots Pixel Height SERP Features Search Intent Keyword Clusters Topic Modeling Search Volume Ad Presence Ad Performance Co-Occurrence Competitor Performance Competitor Discovery Share of Voice Visual Share of Voice URL Screenshots NLP Analysis Video Discussions & Forums Social Knowledge Graph SERP Feature Interiors FAQ Flight Details Hotel Details Review details PLA Text Ads People Also Ask Refine this search Organic Commerce Related Products Shops News News Details Price & Currency Google vs. Bing Buying Guide Howto Job Details Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

SQL is a decent lingua franca for turning SERP data into BI Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber select search_domain, url, title, desc, position, people_also_asked_snippets from results.organic_results where fetch_date = “2023-11-08” limit 100000

Impacts: ● Fold visibility ● CTR ● Clicks / Sessions ● Conversions ● Revenue 600+ distinct elements across the SERPs Paid Content ● Pixel depth: 120px ● Pixel height: 320px ● Visual position: 1 ● Nested position: 2 Organic Result ● Pixel depth: 440px ● Pixel height: 330px ● Visual position: 3 ● Title changed

We mapped every single element on the SERP and put it into a data warehouse Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

Accelerating integrations and data analysis Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

Four levels of SERP analysis Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Rank Tracking “10 blue links” Share of Voice SERP Features Complete Data Shape of the SERP Pixels & Visual Rank Direct Impact on CTR

What vs. why KPIs Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber What? ● Impressions ● Clicks ● CTR ● Rank ● Organic Traffic Why? ● Pixel depth ● Visual rank ● Zero-click ● Layout change ● Visual SoV ● SERP Features

Traffic planning on a statistically relevant sample size Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber 1%-10% of your indexed pages is a good place to start

Analytics is getting harder Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber ● GA4: 󰗭 ● Third-party cookies: 󰗞 ● Ad blockers: 🔥(~40% of US users) [1] ● Very few companies have good analytics set up due to complexity [1]:https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/subscription-creep-costs-us-consumers-more-than- 1000-a-year-cnet-survey-finds/

Pre- vs. Post- click analytics Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Pre-click (SERP data) ● Pixel depth ● Rank ● Visual rank ● Market landscape ● SERP Features ● Competitors (Easy) Post-click (website data) ● Cookie settings ● Ad blockers & privacy laws ● GA4… ● Tag issues ● ERP integration ● CRM integration (Hard)

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber What? Why? Answering more questions beyond “what?” Who?

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Product and ad teams are natural adjacent teams for SERP analytics

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Good SEO is good product management, and vice-versa.

Most SEO problems are corporate strategy problems Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber You have a product problem, not an SGE problem

Increasing adoption of SEO data across disciplines Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Complexity increases Developer ● APIs ● Data lakes SEO Analyst ● SERP data ● Crawl data ● GSC ● GA ● Exploration Content Team ● Content & topics ● Content performance ● Visibility trends Product ● Technical ● SERP rankings ● Indexation ● PAA ● Knowledge Graph Executive / Reporting ● Permissions ● Dashboards ● Speed of answers ● Forecasting ● Predictive Performance Team ● Ad data ● Hotel Ads ● Shopping ● Google for Jobs ● etc.

Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber How to meet the needs of all of these groups?

Adopt existing frameworks Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Data Operations Observability (log files + search index / database) Problem domains Asset / Technology Parallels to SEO ● Log files: SERPs ● Parsed log files: Parsed SERPS (JSON, etc.) ● Index: ??? Data Science BI Datasets ML Models Dashboards & Visualizations ● SERPs ● GSC ● GA4 ● Keyword sets, etc. ● Looker Studio ● Superset ● DOMO ● etc.

Tools that can help accelerate and support many use cases Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Data Lakes BI / Dashboards / Data apps Cloud Data Warehouse ● S3-compatible object storage ● BigQuery ● Snowflake ● Redshift ● Looker Studio ● Superset ● Jupyter & other notebooks ● Python data apps (Dash, Streamlit)

Simplified access to SERP data Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Developers SEO Team Content Team Product Team Executive / Reporting Performance Team APIs Data Warehouse Data Lakes Data Warehouse Data Warehouse SEO & Content Tools BI

Understanding the workflows Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

Most “BI” is NOT intelligence Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

The winners have repeatable processes Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber

Intelligence requires action Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Review and plan Allow for some time after the campaign to ensure that data is vetted. Review successes and failures, establish regression baselines, and plan next phase. Execute campaign Create new content, optimize existing content, work on digital PR, etc. This execution phase should be tied to achieving strategic and operational goals Define monitoring Hone research data set into campaign and group-focused segments, which can be prioritized for action Define strategic goals Intelligence lifecycles are derived from strategic vision and initiatives Research opportunities Initial SERP and search volume focused analysis of competitive and market landscape 01 05 04 03 02

Mapping between workflows Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber Organic Exploratory vs. Regression vs. Reporting Product Launch vs. Engagement Paid Baseline + ROAS

Let’s talk! Speakerdeck.com/raygrieselhuber @raygrieselhuber x.com/demandsphere linkedin.com/in/raygrieselhuber