SEO Tracking – Advanced Google Analytics
How using advanced techniques can help improve your SEO and conversion rates…
Google Analytics is my absolute favourite website analytics tool. I cannot tell you enough how important it is to have it installed on your website so you can track visitor numbers, trends and more. Anyone with an SEO campaign to run, whether they are employing a company, such as Creare to run their internet marketing, or are doing it inhouse should definitely get involved with google Analytics on a deeper level.
Of course, Google Analytics provides some fantastic data, even if you don’t apply any ‘extras’ to the package.
I have recently been playing about with a lot of the features and wanted to share my findings with you all – and explain how useful they are.
eCommerce Tracking
Google Analytics can track your eCommerce site. It can show which keywords bring the most sales, which landing pages lead to sales and ultimately how much revenue is made directly from the search engines. Pretty useful stuff methinks!
Install eCommerce Tracking into your online shop is a little bit more complicated than the usual ‘bog standard’ analytics but is well worthwhile. The best advice I can give you is to follow the advice on this page to get the tracking code installed correctly.
Once it is installed, you will have to wait for a day (or two) and then you will start to receive really useful data. You can use this data to determine the best way forward for your business. For example, if the keywords you currently optimise for don’t bring much revenue, then it’s time to change tack. Or, perhaps you campaign is bringing revenue from sources you didn’t realise were so lucrative – you can start to transfer efforts to where it’s needed to make the most of your online sales.
Advanced Segmentation
This is another cool little feature that I have found useful. Basically you can segment off your keywords to see exactly the kind of traffic they bring and whether your keyword choices are the right ones for your business. I call this pretty powerful stuff. You can set several variables, so you may optimise your site for 5 keywords, so you can put these all in a group together choosing ‘match’ – where the tracking code will see if visits to the site originate from the keyword alone. What I find useful is to also create a segment with all your keywords in, but choose ‘Contains’. This means you can look at the traffic that comes to your site by searching for your keywords in the longtail. This can then be compared against your actual keywords.
Funnels
You can also set up funnels to track the path a user takes towards your desired goal – this could be a sale, or a completed contact form, or a downloadable e-book. This is useful because it can tell you where people ‘drop-off’ and you can then make improvements in order to retain them.
Get the Best out of Google Analytics
It’s then useful to combine your segments and funnels with the eCommerce tracking as it can tell you which keywords bring consistent revenue over time.
The best way to get the most our of Google Analytics is to have a play about with it, find what works for you.
Google Analytics has a lot of features. Some will be red herrings for your purposes, some will be the golden nuggets you dream of finding. It’s up to you to discover which features are going to suit your needs best. Make yourself a list of all the data you would find useful for your site and then play with Google Analytics until you can get the data you need from it.
