W5P4: Measuring & Tracking with Analytics – John Larson & UNLV Continuing Education

What Are Web Page Metrics?

Page metrics are the raw data used to analyze website and campaign performance. By tracking rankings, referrals, links, clicks, conversion, bounce rate and more, you can determine if your SEO strategy is successful or if you need to rethink your plan.

Which Metrics Should I Track?

Which metrics you track depends on your campaign goals. The following is a list of nearly universal SEO metrics are all critical metrics to consider to when optimizing for the search engines.

READ: For a more comprehensive look at web analytics, check out this article by Avinash Kaushil: Six Web Metrics / Key Performance Indicators to Die for. He describes what key performance indicators are and which ones to watch for success.

READ: A lot has changed since the 1990’s… The days of tracking hits, browser platforms, and operating systems are long gone. Today, it’s all about bounce rate, repeat visits, internal search keywords, and conversions. Check out this article by Rich Page: Web Metrics 101 – What DO all These Terms Mean?, and get a quick primer on which website metrics are useful for improving your site.

Search Engine Share of Referring Visits

Every month, it’s critical to keep track of your traffic sources. These include:

Direct Navigation: Typed in traffic, bookmarks, email links without tracking codes, etc.
Referral Traffic: Inbound links across the web or in trackable email, promotion & branding campaign links
Search Traffic: Queries that sent traffic from any major or minor web search engine

By knowing both the percentage and exact numbers, you will be able to easily identify weaknesses and the data will be useful for tracking changes over time.

Example

Traffic spikes that come from referral links with low relevance are nothing to get excited over, however, if search engine traffic begins to fall dramatically, you may be in trouble.

Use your data to track your marketing efforts and plan your traffic acquisition strategies.

Visits Referred By Specific Search Engine

Tracking and measuring where your traffic comes from is vital for several reasons:

Compare Performance versus Market Share

By separating search engine traffic by country, you will be able to determine if the search engine traffic is consistent with its market share. Some niches, like technology or internet services, will have higher demand on Google due to its younger, tech-savvy demographic.

Search Visibility versus Traffic Drops

By knowing the relative traffic correlated with the search engine market share, you will be able to diagnose problems with your website.

If you notice your traffic drop, check if the traffic has declined equally across all of the search engines. If it has, your website has a problem with crawlability or accessibility.
If you notice your traffic drop and the drop is only from one search engine, your website has a penalty or your SEO efforts have devalued the website.

Uncover Strategic Values

Some of your SEO efforts will have a greater impact on one search engine versus another.

Example

On-page optimization tactics (like better keyword inclusion and targeting) typically have more impact on Bing and Yahoo; while gaining keyword rich anchor text links from a large number of domains has a more positive impact on Google.

If you’re able to identify which tactic is having success with one search engine, you will be in a better position to strategize your efforts.

Visits Referred by Specific Search Engine Terms and Phrases

Knowing which keywords are sending traffic is vital to your success. Keeping track of these terms/phrases will allow you to focus your content on what is driving your traffic. Plus, if you track the data on a regular basis, you will be able to determine if keyword demand is changing.

Tracking search engine referral counts for terms specific to your business or industry will allow you to visualize trends that you might not have seen. If the referral volume for these terms begins to decline – you need to assess why. Is there a seasonal influence affecting search patterns or has your website dropped in the rankings?

Conversion Rate by Search Query/Phrase

By knowing the search terms that bring buyers to your site, you will be able to calculate your conversion rates for each search phase. In the example above, 8.18% of visitors who visited yourdomain.com with the search query “website optimizing” took action*. This conversion rate is much higher than most of the other keywords used to find our site. With this information, we can now do 2 things.

Example

After checking our (fictional) rankings and see that “website optimizing” is currently ranked 5th, we can work to improve this ranking position – driving more visitors to our site and increasing conversions.

By checking our analytics data, we can determine which page our visitors landed on (http://www.yourdomain.com/website-optimizing.html) and we can focus on creating a better user experience for them.

This simplistic approach allows us to see which keywords are sending visitors who convert to customers. By improving rankings and the quality of the landing page we can increase conversions. By looking at your data closely, you will be able to determine more about your sales, conversion, and areas to focus on.

Number of Pages Receiving At Least One Visit from Search Engines

You should also track which pages are receiving traffic and from “where.” Not only will the data inform you of how search engines are indexing your pages, you will be able to discover where you need to focus your attention. As you work on issues like site architecture, link acquisition, XML Sitemaps, uniqueness of content and meta data, etc., you should notice an over trend of increased traffic as more pages are earning their way into the engines’ results – if you don’t, find out why?

There are other metrics you should consider reviewing, but the ones listed above will provide maximum leverage in most SEO campaigns.

How to Track Web Page Traffic

No matter which analytics software you decide is right for you, we also strongly recommend testing different versions of pages on your site and making conversion rate improvements based on the results. Testing pages on your site can be as simple as using a free tool to test two versions of a page header or as complex as using an expensive multivariate software to simultaneously test hundreds of variants of a page. There are many testing platforms out there, but if you’re looking to put a first toe in the testing waters, one free, easy to use solution we recommend is Google’s Content Analytics. It’s a great way to get started running tests that can inform powerful conversion rate improvements.

Analytical Software Solutions

Choosing an analytics platform to measure your data can be a tough decision, but the best software to start with is Google Analytics. It’s acceptance in the online marketing community has produced dozens of tutorials and guides to help you get started. Google Analytics also allows you to take advantage of Google’s integration with their other products like Webmaster Tools and Adwords.

READ: Avinash Kaushik wrote an article back in 2006. How to Choose a Web Analytics Tool: A Radical Alternative, that is still relevant today. He explains the limitations of data collection, allowing you to ahead of the curve and start producing meaningful reports to help your optimization process quicker.

Free Analytics Software

Paid Analytics Software

READ: Most beginning digital marketers start with Google Analytics. Why not? It’s free, provides decent data and is intertwined is Google’s related products making it a no-brainer. But, it’s not your only choice and certainly not the best choice for every application. Check out this list, Web Stats: Alternatives to Google Analytics, by Impact.com for a list of analytics solutions.

READ: With analytical data so important to data tracking, you can imagine there are dozens of software choices (free and paid) to choose from. Tome Demars has put together an excellent starting point for beginning SEO’s: Web Analytics Software Comparison: Identifying The Right Web Analytics Tools For Your Business, that explores the many free to mid-level tools available.

More Search Engine Metrics to Consider

Despite your inability to track and measure specific elements within search engine algorithms, there are combinations of tactics that have become SEO best practices to learn insightful data about your website. When used in conjunction with analytical data, they will provide positive (or negative) ranking signals to help you measure your campaign progress.

Having access to all of your data is only part of the picture… Unless you have a plan, you are wasting time. You need to decide what you want to change/grow/build before you start collecting data in order to know what data to look at.

Metrics Provided by Search Engines

Analytics will only provide you with some much data. You will need to use other tools to bring the whole picture into focus. By combining analytics with effective search queries, you will learn the information you need to take action.

READ: By now, you’ve figured out that SEO work often means sorting through large amounts of data and knowing the “ins & outs” can mean the difference between success and failure. Bonnie Stefanick wrote an excellent article: Advanced Search Operator Tactics, which will help you gain a better understanding. By reading resources like this, you will become more resourceful when doing down-and-dirty site auditing, link prospecting, and competitor analysis.

Google

Google Site Query

e.g. site:yourdomain.com/ is useful to see the number and list of web pages indexed on a particular domain. By adding additional query parameters (filters), e.g. site:yourdomain.com/blog intitle:seo – will display a list of results in the domains blog with the term “seo” in the title. By learning Google’s available search operators you will be able to quickly learn valuable information about your website (and your competitions).

e.g., “intitle:red balloons” – this query will show pages that Google has found on that include the phrase “red balloons” in the title. This search can be useful in identifying competitors for your keywords. By using a variety of Google search operators in search, you can gain valuable insights to your competition and find ranking opportunities.

READ: For a practical SEO application, check out this article by Rand Fishkin: Indexation for SEO: Real Numbers in 5 Easy Steps. In the post, Rand offers you a step-by-step method to determine how many pages of your website have been indexed by Google.

Google Trends

One of the most popular tools for finding data is Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends/). Trends will share keyword search volume/popularity of trending topics, allow you to compare search terms, and analyze the data over time. If you’re logged into your Google account, you can get specific numbers on charts, rather than trend lines.

Google has also released a “new” visual version of Trends that will display hot topics in full screen. You might find this particularly useful for watching trending topics and social commenting.

READ: Before you jump to conclusions about Trends, take a double look. This Google product offers much more that hot topics data, Trends can be one of the most versatile tools for SEO. Read this article by Chuck Price: How to Use Google Trends for SEO, to find out more ways you can use this tool.

Search Link Query

Google’s link command query is designed to display the links pointing at a web page. This tool is useful for looking for link targets as well as analyzing competition. Be warned though, some of Google tools and results are flawed. Rand Fishkin give some valuable input in his article: Google Link: Command – Busting Myths.

IP Query

e.g., ip:216.176.191.233 – this query will show pages that Google has found on the given IP address. This search can be useful in identifying shared hosting accounts and seeing what other sites are hosted on a given IP address.

Bing

Bing Site Query

e.g. site:yourdomain.com/ – just like Google, Bing allows for queries to show the number and list of pages in their index from a particular domain. Bing also offers search operators that will let you dig deeper into the data. Unfortunately, Bing’s counts are not as accurate as Google’s often rendering them useless.

Microsoft Ad Intelligence

The Microsoft Advertising platform offers a variety of keyword research and audience intelligence tools. Although these tools are designed for search and display advertising, they can be “re-purposed” to suit our SEO needs.

Applying the Data

There’s much more to SEO success than collecting the numbers… Your website (and data) will fluctuate constantly. It is your job (as SEO) to interpret the signals provided by tracking data and respond with appropriate actions to improve or expand into new opportunities.

There is Fluctuation with Search Engine Page and Link Count Numbers

There is no need to worry about wild fluctuations in “site:” and “link:” queries showing massive increases or decreases unless they are accompanied by traffic drops. These variances in search engine indexes on any given query provide little advice about your actual link growth (or shrinkage).

Significant drops in link numbers and/or pages indexed accompanied by similar drops in referral traffic from search engines indicates a problem. You may be experiencing either a loss of links (or link juice) and/or a loss of indexation (due to penalties, hacking, malware, etc.).

Start with a thorough analysis using your own web analytics and Google’s Webmaster Tools and see if you can identify potential problems and review your links to see if your important links (high PR links) still exist.

Why is Traffic Declining?

Before you begin “fixing” things, you need to identify where the problem is. Review your data and determine if the traffic has fallen from one search engine or all of them. This is an example why tracking data will provide you with invaluable insights on where to start.

READ: There are a lot of explanations for declines in traffic. Algorithm changes, competition and search engine penalties could all be the culprit. David Harry offers some very good formation on dealing with declining traffic in his article: Google Penalty or Algorithm Change: Dealing With Lost Traffic. He also offers some preventative measures that you can put into action.

Falling traffic from One Search Engine

If a single search engine is sending you considerably less traffic for a wide range of search queries, a small number of possibilities exist:

Your website is under a penalty at that search engine for violating search quality or terms of service guidelines. Check out this post on how to identify or handle a search engine penalty.
You have accidentally blocked that search engines’ spider from crawling your website. Double check your robots.txt file and meta-robots tags to see if there are any potential problems. Also, review your Webmaster Tools account at that search engine to see if any issues exist.
That search engine has changed the ranking algorithm and it no longer favors your website. This commonly happens when links pointing to your website have become devalued. This is especially common for websites that have engaged in manual link building campaigns that focused on low-moderate quality links.

Falling Search Traffic from Multiple Search Engines

This typically indicates that search engine spiders are having problems crawling your website.

Review your robots.txt file or meta-robots tags for any potential problems.
Check your websites server (hosting) to see if there have been any uptime issues or other technical breakdowns.
Check your domain registrar to see if there are any DNS resolution issues.
Review your Webmaster Tools accounts and analytics data to identify any potential causes.

Fluctuations with Individual Rankings

Typically, there is nothing to be worried about as your web pages fluctuate in the SERP’s. Search engines adjust their algorithms, competitors utilize optimization tactics, and search engines even fluctuate as indexes refresh.

New content is especially susceptible to swings in rankings. When published, there is typically a period of high visibility followed by a dramatic drop and the content will fluctuate until the search engine can determine its importance.

If you notice dramatic decreases you should review your on-page elements for any signs of over-optimization or guideline violations (cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc.) and see if any links have recently been gained or lost.

Increases in Link Metrics Without Page Ranking Increases

We live in an age where people expect instant results. unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.

If you are competing in a competitive market, it can take time to reach the top. Not only do the search engine spiders need to crawl your content and acquire all of your links, they need to process the information and index the results too. It may take days or even weeks for the SEO progress you’ve made to be reflected in the results.

Conclusion

They say that if you can measure it, then you can improve it. In search engine optimization, measurement is critical to success. As a professional SEO, you will need to track data about rankings, referrals, links and more in your efforts to create and apply a successful SEO campaign.

READ: Looking for more Google Analytics information? This guide, The Ultimate Guide to 150+ Google Analytics Resources for 2015, by KissMetrics will help point you in the right direction. Whether you’re looking for the top Google Analytics channels, Analytics integrations, tools for Google Analytics, or articles about Google Analytics – this is the source.

READ: Ready to get serious with Google Analytics? Consider going through the free Google Analytics Academy. You’ll receive lessons by industry experts, gain access to the Google Analytics learning community and test your knowledge with quizzes and practice exams designed to get you ready the Google Analytics Designation.

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