Measuring Your Sites Success with Google Analytics

Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 12:12 pm. 0 comments

The first thing any online marketer should do with a site is install website analytics. The sooner you do this the better – if you are taking on a project and it isn’t already installed on a site then you should recommend it to be installed before you start. This way you will have some real data before you start your campaigns (organic or paid) and you will have a much better idea of how the site is performing.  Before you start any SEO campaign it’s vital to understand what kind of visitors the site gets and how long those visitors spend on the site this way you can improve on any results the site is getting and it may give you an insight into which keywords actually generate quality traffic.

 

Currently the best value for money tool out there is Google Analytics, Google analytics is an incredibly versatile and “free” tool from Google that allows you to track the visitors to your site by placing a small snippet of code on your website. It will allow you to analyse the traffic that enters your site, find out which keywords they use and how long they stay on your website as well as a host of other analytical information.

 

The key to measuring your results in Google analytics is to use the “goal” settings to create a metric to measure your sites success. A goal can be any event that results in a visitor performing an action such as an email or newsletter signup. Once you have set this up you can use it as a measure of success of your SEO campaigns. Another great feature of GA is that you can set up an automated email to create a monthly report for clients, selecting all the information you want to appear in their report. Currently one drawback of GA is that reporting is not real time, with typically a 12-24 hour delay in results.