Search Engine Marketing Blog

If your website is an online shop selling products to consumers then it is probably easier to measure the success compared to a site promoting a brand.

Every website should have a purpose and be a tool which provides value to a business and you shouldn’t just have a site because all of your competitors have one. Your website should make up part of the marketing strategy and if it isn’t fulfilling its role then review the site to find out why people aren’t buying or not contacting you as a result.

Google Analytics is a great way to measure the success of your website and set benchmarks. A direct measure like the volume of sales or leads enables you to reach a conclusion easier. But if your website is there to endorse your brand then this can sometimes be harder to measure.

By using the data provided by Google Analytics you are able to calculate the sites’ brand engagement by analysing the search terms and direct visits to your site. This can help to measure the impact of offline marketing activities and your brands’ presence amongst your users.

So make sure that you have Google Analytics on your site and start measuring your site’s success!

As a UK Search Engine Marketing Company, we provide our clients with regular reports and updates on how their SEO campaign is progressing. Part of our client reporting includes information on where their keywords are in the major search engines. This is almost a given but it should not be the only measurement of success, nor even the most important aspect.

If you are planning your own search engine optimisation campaign, you really need to focus on your keyword research and understand which phrases are going to bring in the most relevant visitors to your site. It is often the case that a site owner will go after a ‘vanity phrase’ which is often a single word, highly competitive and, even if you were to get a top spot, would not necessarily bring in the ‘right type’ of visitor.

You should try and understand what phrases are more likely to bring in prospects for what you offer rather than the glory of getting hundreds of worthless visits to your site. Quality, not quantity!

We always recommend that you use a good quality analytics package. There are many in the market but, for most site owners, Google Analytics is more than sufficient. Once you have your account set-up and have implemented the code to start tracking visits, you will be able to uncover valuable data about your site’s traffic and will be able to make informed decisions about how well your search engine marketing campaign is performing. For example, you will be able to set up funnels to see how visitors progress through your site and (ouch!), what point they leave.

You will be able to determine your bounce rate* by keywords and see very clearly where you may have rankings that are not adding value or your site needs improving to convert those visitors.

*What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

It’s only natural to want your site as high up the rankings as possible but relevance is key.

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If you’re a UK business wanting to get more from your online marketing, you should review our Search Engine Optimisation Services.

Many website owners may be looking at their analytics accounts and thinking “I’m sure I am getting more traffic than this?” The chances are, they actually are!

As people are using newer browsers like Firefox, they are utilising more of the useful extensions and privacy options, one of which is an option where you can choose not to run JavaScript.

Now the big problem with this is that if you use a program such as Google Analytics that rely on JavaScript tracking codes to track visitors to your website, visitors with JavaScript disabled will not be tracked.

The way to cross reference this is to regularly check your analytics data against your websites log files and that way you will be able to see just how many visitors are invisible to your analytics account.

When reviewing your websites statistics in Google Analytics just be careful when you are reviewing the statistic Average Time On Site from your Dashboard. It is important to remember that this data can be skewed really easily by a small number of visitors to your website.

It only takes one visitor to leave your site open in their browser while they take a telephone call to increase this stat.

If you see improvements with this statistic drill down deeper in your analytics account and view the report, Time on Site for All Visitors. This report will show the average time on site broken down by day. This will allow you to see if they have been any days where there is any extraordinary user activity on your website.

Go on, you may be surprised by the results.

Although an AdWords Search Query Report can give you some idea of what search queries are triggering broad and phrase match keywords much of the useful data is hidden under ‘….other unique queries’ entries.

This data is an absolute gold mine for identifying new keyterms and negative keywords.

So how do we find out what some of those hidden terms were?

By using Google Analytics thats how. By following the simple instructions shown at www.semvironment.com you can easily start to use this vital data.

Do you know how many people leave your site as soon as they arrive? Do you know where these visitors came from? If the answer is no, then you had better sign up for a Google Analytics account immediately.

The bounce rate can be found on the dashboard in Google Analytics and quickly provides you with a snapshot of the user’s first impression of your website.

If they found your site relevant to their search they will stay and explore your site further. This lets you know that the user found your site relevant and as a result your bounce rate will be low. However, if the page the visitor arrived at was not relevant and they left your site without visiting any other page, then you would expect to see a high bounce rate. Remember the landing page may not always be your homepage.

Your bounce rate has a relationship with your conversion rate so if you are able to lower your bounce rate and become more relevant to user’s searches then you could see in an increase in the number of sales and leads.

Use the reports within Google Analytics to identify individual pages which have a high bounce rate so you are able to improve landing pages and spot traffic sources which are delivering unqualified visitors.

When it comes to tracking and analysing statistics for a website, you will find that most web hosts will provide some kind of statistical package as part of your hosting arrangement.

However, these vary in quality and very often only give a superficial level of detail. If you’re a small business and serious with your Internet marketing efforts, be it search engine optimisation or pay per click, then you will want (need) to have a professional analytics package. There are many solutions out there, such as the brilliant Clicktracks Analyzer, but these solutions are often out of the reach for many small business owners.

So what to do? Well, at Impact Media we always recommend our search marketing clients use Google Analytics. Despite being totally free, this is no lightweight solution. Once you set-up your Analytics account, you’ll be provided some code that you simply add to every page of your site. From this point on, your site will be tracked, and not just for Google. You’ll be able to see stats for total visitors, for all search engines as well as direct traffic and pay per click. In particular, if you’re using Google AdWords, you’ll benefit from enhanced reporting capabilities.

From a single account you can manage multiple sites and even share data with other users. Reports can be exported and your data can be ’sliced and diced’ in many different ways.

All in all, Google has provided individuals and businesses of all sizes, a great way to get the most out of their website statistics and we definitely recommend it!