Throughout your years of marketing I am sure you have run into fellow marketers, and during those run-ins I am almost positive that you talked about things such as if rich anchor text really has that much of an effect on rankings, why content marketing is so important, black hat methods, and analytics. Occasionally, we have all run into the individual who says they love marketing but they don’t really use analytics.
Pause.
Don’t use analytics? How can someone be an effective marketer without analytics? The answer is – you can’t. If you aren’t analyzing any data that you are collecting from websites how will you ever know if you are improving anything? The entire point of SEO or any form of Online Marketing Tacoma is to attract more visitors and drive more leads (regardless of what those leads are), and the only way to know if you are doing these two things is to quantify them with charts, data, and raw numbers.
Here are some essential things that you should do with analytics that will enhance your reporting and give you a better understanding of what’s working and what isn’t working on your site.
Setting up Filters
It still surprises me to this day that some people don’t take the time (roughly 2 minutes) to set up filters for certain IP addresses. You should absolutely block any IP address that you are constantly working from, or your client is working from automatically.
You can get more in-depth with the filters and create different views within analytics. For example, I always like to create a “RAW” view so that I know those numbers are original and unfiltered.
Upgrading to Universal Analytics
Although this may seem obvious, upgrading to universal analytics can help you track things more accurately, quicker, and easier! Google didn’t send out this update for no reason. If you haven’t upgraded to UA I would suggest doing so ASAP.
Implementing Custom Segments & Tracking Codes
You don’t have to stick to the default segments in Google Analytics! Believe it or not, you can actually create your own segments and set the dashboard up to only display information that you want to see. If you only want to look at traffic coming from social networks, you can set up a segment for that. How about looking at organic visitors vs paid visitors to see whether you should focus more on PPC or SEO?
Things like this can all be setup with a little work and it will make your job a lot easier.
Conversion Tracking
Conversions are the single most important thing within the marketing world. If you aren’t generating conversions, all of your work has gone to waste. Now, conversions can be a lot of different things – but for the most part we consider a conversion as having the visitor do something that you want. For example, many would consider a new visitor signing up for a newsletter as a conversion. Others might consider a new visitor on a certain page to be a conversion.
No matter what your definition is, conversion tracking can make or break your marketing efforts because it can clearly show you what’s working and what is not.
Custom Reports
Last but not least, google analytics gives us the ability to create completely custom reports. If your client wants a specific set of data sent to them every single month, all you have to do is located this data and tell Google Analytics to export it every single month.
Custom reporting allows us to give our clients exactly what they want to see – what they care about.
In conclusion, if you aren’t using Google Analytics in your marketing efforts I would strongly suggest starting.
Are you tired of getting fake/inaccurate data from your current marketing firm? Unfortunately, there are a lot of firms in the area that really don’t know what they are doing when it comes to SEO and data analysis. Contact us today and we will give you a free evaluation of how your site is currently doing SEO-wise. Email us today for more info:support
