Wikipedia defines Web Analytics as, “the monitoring and reporting of Web site usage so businesses can better understand the complex interactions between Web visitor actions and Web site offers, as well as leverage that insight for increased customer loyalty and sales.” Simply put, Web Analytics provides information about users of your website on the internet.

Web Analytics helps you understand the user’s experience on your website. Using this information, you can make modifications to your website that will help your website rank higher in search engines and thereby help you get more website traffic. It not only gives information about the number of visitors to the site but gives a world of useful information like time every individual spends on the website, pages visited in the website, where a person left your website, and much more.

SEO importance of Web Analytics

The question here is how does Web Analytics help SEO? Here are some of the ways in which web analytics can influence your SEO campaign:

• Visitors to the site: The very basic of information, this tells you how many visitors came to your site in a given month. You can also compare the data with past information to see how the traffic to your website is growing over a period of time. You can identify trends and seasonality of visitors to your site. In turn, this will help you refine your marketing efforts to coincide with period when visitors to your site are the mximum.

• Top referring keywords: This lists the relevant keywords that brought visitors to your website. Based on this information, you can see where your website ranks for these keywords. In turn, you can make changes that will help your website rank higher for the keyword. The end result is that you can tweak your SEO campaign to rank higher for keywords that are bringing visitors to your website.

• Domains that bring in traffic: Also called referrers, this is another important metric as it gives you an insight about the source of the traffic to your website. If a website is referring visitors to your site, then it tells you the kind of websites you should be present on, which sites the visitors to your site are likely to visit and this can help you refine your link building strategy.

• Click Path: This helps to judge how user friendly your site design is, how people navigate your site and where they are most likely to exit your site. This helps you refine your website navigation and maximize conversions on your website.

• Bounce Rate: This shows how many visitors left your website and which pages they left the site from. This helps you analyze what could be causing people to leave your site and you can accordingly modify the content of your site.

There’s a lot more useful information and data that web analytics provides. The items listed above are the very basic. A proper tracking of your website traffic can provide you with a wealth of information that you can use to refine your SEO campaign and attract more traffic to your website.

Let’s see how Google Analytics helps you track the above details of your website. Google Analytics is a free solution from Google and it can provide you with data that helps you refine your SEO campaigns and attract more traffic. Here’s an example:

In the above image, you can see the details that Google analytics provides about a particular website. You can find that it mentions about number of visits, bounce rates, pageviews, etc. This is a top level view. You can explore details of each of the above metrics, decide refinements to your SEO campaigns and track the impact of the changes you make.

If you do not know the impact of your efforts, it becomes next to impossible to know if your efforts are working. Analyzing the information available through a Web Analytics solution, you can take informed decisions and make changes to your SEO campaigns to drive more website traffic.

Contributed by Sudeep Rao

The reason why Google Analytics (GA) is sought after is that you can track website traffic for a complete process defined in an online business model. One can set the ultimate target as the goal for GA tracking and GA will track every step of the process until the defined goal.

However, the problem is that GA does not reprocess historical data.  GA will only start to track goal conversion data from the day you set the goal in GA. Nevertheless, here is a simple way to track goal conversions without setting goals in GA for historical data as well. To do this, here are some conditions:

1) You should tag your entire website by the proper Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC). At any rate, pages from the landing page to the goal conversion page must have the proper GATC.

2) Here are two examples:

Case I:

The URL of the goal conversion page should be different from the other pages.

Example of unique URLs are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

Here the URL from the Sign up Form to the Final Goal Page has unique URLs: ‘www.mysite.com/sign_up.html’

The ideal path should be as follows:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – www.mysite.com/landingpage.html

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – www.mysite.com/sign_up.html

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – www.mysite.com/thanksone.html

Case II:

The page title should be different for each step despite the unique URLs.

The page name is mentioned between title tags of the page e.g. <title> Page Name </title>. For example, you can check the website www.position2.com where the home page is titled:

<title> Social Media Marketing & Search Engine Marketing Company – Position2 </title>

Therefore, the steps to take for different page names are:

* Step 1 (Landing Page) – Your Air Ticket

* Step 2 (Sign up Form) – Registration Form

* Step 3 (Finish/Final Goal Page) – Thanks for signing up!

Here is how you can get goal conversion values in GA:

1) Go for Advanced Segments

2) Create new segment ‘Goal Conversion’ for Case I above. Use the thank you page request URI ‘/thanksone.html’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

For Case II, use the page title of the thank you page ‘Thanks for signing up!’ in the value field for this segment. Then save the segment.

3) Choose two segments such as the one from Default Segment and another from Goal Conversion. Apply it to the report.

4) You will see the output as:

Here you can clearly see that out of 1,123 visits, 67 visits were converted. We found 98% accuracy of achieving goal conversion numbers through the Advanced Segments approach. You can apply this segmentation to all reports excluding goal-reporting suit.

Contributed by Bhagawat Jadhav