Measure impact from new meta descriptions

[jayoliverwright]

Hi guys,

I'm looking to implement new meta descriptions across a site and i want to measure the impact.

So far I'm thinking of extracting the CTR data from GWT for the last 90 days to get the most accurate CTR averages for each URL. Then once the new meta descriptions have been implemented, compare the CTR with the old CTR averages accross URLs.

Do you think this would be the most accurate way of measuring the impact?

Cheers,

Chris

[MattAntonino]

If you have goal tracking set up, it may make sense to compare conversions as well. While I like to use meta desc to improve CTR, I'd much rather improve conversions. If I can get someone to click through AND take action, that's the best meta desc.

Step 1 - CTR

Step 2 - Conversion/Goal Conversion

If your CTRs are super-low, improving them may not help conversion a ton. If they're already decently high, you may only see a small increase but you could double conversions. I think using the two together makes the most sense.

[eLab_London]

Hey Chris,

I recently did the same thing, I looked at traffic from organic to the specific pages I changed the meta descriptions for. I did 20 for my top sellers and 20 for my slow sellers and watched for incremental increases YoY and WoW through GA. I did see increases although small, will impact my overall traffic in bulk - I have educated the rest of the business and now we write better meta descriptions.

Although your method seems sound and as Matt said ultimately you want to make sure you are converting those people too.

All the best,

K