Looking through your traffic sources in Google Analytics
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Written by admin on August 29, 2008 – 6:49 am
Track External Clicks
If you are setting up any traffic trades, or promoting any affiliate offers on your Web site, keep track of how many clicks you are sending to external sites. For traffic trades, this information can help you negotiate better link placement if you are sending a substantial amount of traffic. For affiliates, this information is invaluable if you monitor the accuracy of the affiliate program’s statistic reporting. Another added benefit of tracking your external clicks is explaining bounce rates.
A bounce occurs when a Web site visitor leaves your Web site without visiting any other pages. If your home page has numerous external links and a high bounce rate, you can research exactly how many of the recorded bounces came from a user clicking on an external link.
Find Keywords
An extremely efficient strategy for deciding what keywords to target in your SEO efforts involves looking at what is already working for your Web site. Terms for which your Web site is already ranking in the top 50 results will typically be easier to dominate than terms where your Web site is not ranked at all.
Looking through your traffic sources in Google Analytics is a very simple way of finding out what keywords are sending you traffic. When analyzing your list, if you come across a keyword that is sending a considerable amount of traffic despite a ranking on the bottom of the first page, or on the second page, of results, you have found a fantastic target for SEO purposes. Finding these keywords ensures that you target only keywords that send sufficient traffic. Also, when using this method in combination with goal tracking, you can focus your SEO efforts towards keywords that you know convert well.
Track E-Commerce
If your Web site lists products for sale, using Google Analytics to track your orders can be an invaluable tool to your SEO, pay-per-click (PPC), and media campaigns. If properly installed, Google Analytics can track a purchase at your Web site to the original source of the visitor who made the purchase. This allows you to track exactly how much revenue was generated from each keyword that is currently driving traffic to your Web site. When you have accurate data about which traffic sources are sending sales, you can push to extract more traffic from those sources to ensure high profits from your search-engine marketing efforts.
Automate Reporting
If you want to keep a separate archive of your Web site’s progression, setting up automatic e-mail reporting can be extremely useful. This feature of Google Analytics allows you to specify what information you want to have reported, and the time interval between reports. The reports can be e-mailed to you, or anyone else you choose, in a variety of formats including PDF and CSV. This makes sharing information and tracking your Web site growth extremely easy, and the PDF option allows you to keep separate hard copies of your Web site data. Having past data available for quick and easy reference can prove extremely useful when making decisions about future campaigns.
