ANALYTICS AND MEASURING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR SEO
The effectiveness of an SEO marketing campaign?must be measured consistently in order to make good business decisions. ?Companies need to know 1) how many search visitors they are receiving; 2) where that search traffic is coming from; 3) whether or not the visitors are finding the information they need on the site and 4) whether or not their decision to take favorable actions (buy or opt-in) is being bottlenecked or impeded in any way. ?Without analyzing this kind of information on a regular basis, it is quite possible that a company could be leaking profits from their search efforts without knowing it.
One of the ways that a company could determine some of the answers to these questions would be to analyze the information in the control panel of their website. ?A fairly detailed level of information can be gathered from these logs for analysis. ?However, the logs are not necessarily organized in a manner that would make it convenient to share information within a web development team or with a client. ?Additionally, these logs don?t track visitors from all referring sites and sources. ? This is important for companies that may be running pay per click ads?along side of their search engine optimization campaigns.
Additionally, marketers need to be able to take note of their sales activity in concert with their traffic. ?They need to know what kind of products tend to be preferred by those who come to the site through certain keywords. ?Or in other cases, they may want to know which visitors come to the site and decide to leave without making a decision that favors the business. ?This information is not readily available in the logs and would take so long to put together for analysis each day that it would be impractical to use.
Fortunately there are programs on the market that provide detailed statistical information for online marketers. ?The programs are broadly classified as analytics programs. ?The idea behind analytics programs is to provide the statistical detail contained in the logs of the website, combined with sales related data to help managers with their decision making. ?The most popular web analytics program is the one managed by search engine company Google.Com.
Called Google Analytics, the program is currently being used by about half of the most popular websites in the world. ?Google Analytics is free for webmasters, although there is a paid version for large complex websites and organizations. ?There are other analytics programs on the market most of which require a fee of some kind, ranging from $2.50 per month to $119 per month, including Woopra.com, Mint.com, Clicky.com, Statcounter.com, Reinvigorate.com, Piwik.com, Chartbeat.com, Mixpanel.com and Kissmetrics.com.
At a first glance the previous information would seem illogical. ?If companies are optimizing their websties for search visibility on Google.com and Google?s analytics programs is free, why would anyone choose to use another service that they would have to pay for? Interestingly, the answer is commonly understood among veteran marketers. ?Google provides businesses with a great analytics tool (Google Analytics), primarily because of the information that it the tool provides to their company.
The fact that Google has detailed information on how webmasters? sites operate, is troubling to some site owners precisely because they want their site to be highly visible. ?The reservation of some webmasters is that they don?t want there to be an unfavorable decision made about their site?s activities causing them to fall in rankings.
While this statement might sound somewhat like paranoia, the experience of many site owners in the early spring of 2012 would prove that that it is not. ?Utilizing information from their some of their analytics tools, Google?s search engine analysts discounted ranking factors for a broad number?of websites in over a very short period of time.
Online marketers whose income was dependent on the search traffic that they were able to generate were left to scramble to figure out what to do. ?The argument was made that a number of these sites had already provided so much information to Google?that moving their site back into position would be a very difficult task. ?It is for this reason that some webmasters would not opt for an analytics program that Google provides to them.
They would rather not trade the information about their site activity and SEO techniques. ?Users of Google Analytics would argue that if a business is not engaging in questionable search engine optimization tactics, then there would be no reason to be concerned. ?In fact, they would argue that providing the information to Google through their analytics program would actually help a business more than harm it.
Regardless of whether a company chooses to use Google Analytics, an online business owner will need five basic kinds of information from their analytics program:
- The ability to tell how many visitors are coming to your site for a given period of time.
- The ability to tell what is happening on their site in real time or as close to real time as they can get.
- The ability to know how long their site visitors are staying and what kind of time they spend on different pages
- Where their visitors are coming from along with what devices and browsers they are using to access the site
- The ability to tell whether visitors are seeing the offers and content that they were intended to see.
Armed with this information, companies can make decisions about the following:
- Is our company?s SEO campaign on our targeted keywords leading to more sales?
- Is the copywriting on our website enticing people to take favorable actions such as to become leads/opt-in or make purchase?
- Is our website content causing people to leave our site without reading or experiencing it?
- Is our campaign aimed at the wrong demographic?
- Is our company making the right kind of offer to those who come to our site?
Analytics gives site owners the kind of information that they truly need in order to make business decisions. ?It is very easy to believe that because sales are generated that meet targets, that reaching this goal is sufficient. ?The question to ask is whether it is possible that the company could be doing better in some area of their marketing and promotional funnel. ?Analytics provides an objective analysis to be discussed between company management, client & consultant, or webmaster & staff to decide whether the company?s current efforts are sufficient.
Source: http://www.name.com/blog/startmybiz/2012/12/analytics-and-measuring-the-effectiveness-of-your-seo/
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