What is Google Analytics
Google Analytics can tell you most important things you want to know about how your visitors find you and how they interact with your DNN Portal. You can focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver Return on Investment, and improve your site to convert more visitors. Google Analytics has the enterprise-level capabilities you'd expect from a high-end web analytics that cost a lot, also provides timesaving integration with AdWords as well as tracks all of your non-AdWords initiatives as well.
Three of the main areas we look at are
1. Search traffic – how much traffic are search engines sending, growth rates and conversions
2. Keywords – which terms are bringing the most traffic and affecting conversions
3. Content performance – which content items are performing the best and search traffic growth.
Today we’ll look at ‘Search traffic’ and how we can use Google Analytics to dig better understand the efficacy of your SEO program.
Search traffic analytics
Many times in the SMB world we’ll have limited engine targeting, as far as targeting Google more so than say Live. Because of limited budgets, many small business owners simply can’t afford to be chasing the engines with smaller traffic share. Looking at over-all search traffic growth is a simple, but effective metric. So fire up GA and go to;
‘Traffic Sources > Search Engines’
One of the simplest views is month over month,
This will give you some ongoing data as to the progress of your campaigns. As important as search traffic growth is, be sure to ALWAYS investigate the conversions (goals) tab as well. Here’s what our ‘Goal Conversions’ info looks like,
Digging deeper
The first advanced segment we’ll make is for visitors that have gone deeper than 3 pages on the site like so; Now when you go back to the; ‘Traffic > Search Engines’ report, go up to the top right and select where it says ‘Advanced Segments’. In the drop-down select, from our custom ones, the new segment we just created (whatever name U gave it).
What is great about using this simple engagement segmentation is that we can see how effectively we’re engaging traffic from search engines and converting it as well. From here we can dig into the actual keyword data for cross supporting data which can establish the over-all efficacy of the program. That is to say, we also want to look at which keywords/phrases are driving conversions and which aren’t. More on that later.
Visit http://www.netultimate.com/SEO.php for articles on how to improve the conversion rate for your website.
