Analytics : Understand Your Traffic

Analytics systems allows you to get in-depth information about  your website. They are vital to get the most out both of your search engine marketing and search engine optimization efforts. Analytics systems helps you to identify sources of incoming traffic, provides you with an overview of your audience, how they navigate throughout your website and they help assist you in finding the weak spots.

A wide range of analytics systems are available. One of the most commonly used is Google Analytics, which has many merits. It provides in-depth information, can be easily integrated with Google Adwords and is free.

Analytics systems also play a crucial part in understanding the impacts of pay-per-click campaigns and search engine optimization.

On a basic level, analytics systems provides you with data about your audience and the traffic they generate. The metrics usually include the following items:

• Number of unique visitors
• Number page impressions
• Average visit length
• Geographical data
• Technical details (i.e.: operating system, browser, language, etc.)
• Traffic sources (i.e.: direct traffic, inbound links from referring sites and search engines)

Analytics allows you to drill down and extract all the information you need to optimize further your search engine marketing and search engine optimization activities.

Analytics in Search Engine Marketing

• Track conversions – though Google Adwords can track conversions within its own system, you might have other online marketing activities and most analytics systems can help you track the effects of those as well, thus you are able to track the return-on-investment.
• Identify conversion pitfalls- if the “road” to a conversion consists of multiple steps, tracking the journey of a visitor can help to identify problematic spots which enables you to further optimize the user experience on your website.
• New keywords – you can see all the search keywords visitors used to get to your site. Some will be obvious but you might just find keywords that give you hints in to a consumer’s insight and can help you to widen the keywords you use in your search engine marketing campaigns.

Analytics in Search Engine Optimization

• Traffic sources – analytics systems give you in-depth details on the different sources of traffic. You can analyze incoming search traffic and find patterns. Using this feedback you can refine the ongoingsearch engine optimizationprocess
• Inbound links – link building is essential to increase the visibility of your site and to reach a good ranking in search engines. You can measure the traffic coming from referral sites and you can see which sites points the most visitors toward your direction.