A digital thought leader says it’s “only a matter of time” before online campaigns to increase website traffic become fully automated.
StewArt Media describes itself as “one of Australia’s leading digital marketing companies specialising in SEO, paid advertising, conversion and content optimisation”.
CEO Jim Stewart issued the warning. He says business owners doing in-house SEO may be better off using the two artificial-intelligence (AI) metrics in Google Analytics.
Session quality
“The first of these metrics is session quality,” Mr Stewart said. “This is useful for businesses with an e-commerce website processing a minimum of 1000 transactions per month.
“Businesses can show clients their conversion data with this tool alone. For example, you can see the quality of sessions that were rated 51-100 or 91-100 and then see where the best conversions are coming from.
“The closer a session is rated to 100, the more likely it was that the website session generated a sale.
“It will save time and money because no human intervention or calculations are needed. Session-quality scores are especially useful for remarketing purposes.”
Conversion probability
The second useful metric, according to Mr Stewart, is conversion probability. This is still in beta testing, he says, and gives similar feedback. As the name suggests, this metric breaks down user sessions into likelihood to convert.
“The more you learn about what turns the high-converting users into buyers, the better chance you have of tracking down and converting future visits,” Mr Stewart said.
Businesses should expect fewer sales and higher cost per click in the first month or so of using AI SEO campaigns, he warns. But he adds: “You won’t see results quickly on a small campaign, but when you do, they’ll be worth it.”
The reason you need volume for AI to be useful is because it needs data to learn, Mr Stewart says. And amassing volume takes time. However: “Once AI builds up enough data to learn from, the cost per click will fall dramatically.
“If you’ve got some serious volume on your campaign, you can switch on some of these implementations inside Google Analytics. You can then use that data and Google Ads’ AI to do some pretty incredible stuff.”
