Analytics Should Be Your Best Friend

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

For a newcomer, stepping into the area of search engine marketing can be quite overwhelming especially if they haven’t really ventured into the online marketing space before. It is bad enough for those individuals to try and learn how to do many of the items themselves but to analyze the raw data and dissect it in order to understand how it is working for them could be a lengthy learning curve. There are many good analytics software packages out there, but I highly recommend Google analytics for most websites. It is easy to use, free and reliable.

Let’s take a look at some of the most important areas to view in your Google analytics account:

1. Visitors: In this section of your Google analytics software you can see a variety of information specific to your visitor. You can see what types of browsers people use to find you along with things like connection speeds and what kind of mobile devices people use when they are on the go to find your business. Often times a website or functions of a website will appear different in other browsers. This will give you a better understanding what elements you need to work on with your website to make sure things are consistent across the board.

2. Traffic Sources: This section will be your best friend. This is where it shows you what keywords are driving traffic along with which referring sites are bringing over traffic. You are going to want to look at this information on a regular basis in order to see what is going on with your marketing. If a website posted a link about you and it is delivering traffic to your website you are going to want to know this type of information. Once you get going with your online marketing and SEO this section of the analytics software is going to be your best friend. It will show you what is actually working and what isn’t. If you spend a great deal of time in a certain area that almost never delivers any type of traffic than this information will be valuable so that you can make the proper changes so that traffic does find their way to your site.

3. Content: This section allows you to go through the pages of your website along with any blog posts you might have to drill down to specific page data. This will allow you to target various elements on those specific pages in order to maximize their overall efficiency. If you notice a certain page get a great deal of traffic but the bounce rate is quite high you can make the necessary changes to reduce that bounce rate.

Google analytics is very important and will be even more important when times moves on and your SEO becomes very robust and comprehensive. Learn it now while you are getting started. You will have an easier time to understand the data down the road.