Analytics is About Psychology, SEO is About Technology
Digital Analytics
Hopefully you've followed the guidelines for SEO in building your site and you're getting visitors. Here is where you fine tune to meet your goals.
Digital Analytics is the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your business and the competition to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers and potential customers have which translates to your desired outcomes (both online and offline). -Avinash Kaushik
SEO and Analytics go hand in hand. You build your site following SEO best practices, you measure the visitor traffic, and then you refine your SEO to improve your success toward achieving desired outcomes. Desired outcomes differ among organizations and their missions.
Desired outcomes are also called "conversions" in analytics terminology.
Generally a website will fall into one of five categories:
- Ecommerce - the desired outcome or conversion is a sale.
- Lead Generation - a conversion would be when a visitor submits a request for more information.
- Content Publisher - the desired outcome would be for frequent visitation by the same visitor and engagement as measured by the number of pages on the site they visit.
- Online Information and Support - sites whose purpose is to provide information to visitors would also be monitored for frequent visitation and engagement.
- Branding - sites whose purpose is to build awareness, engage visitors, and develop customer loyalty.
Whatever type of website you have, we setup a mearsurement plan based on your business objectives. Raw data needs to be packaged into meaningful reports. Analysis of these reports is conducted to see where website improvements might be made. Candidates for improvemeent are tested on the site. Lastly, the improvements are finalized and implemented on the site. It doesn't necessarily end there and this process can be repeated until you feel you are getting the most out of your site.
Analytics is all about tracking visitor behavior once they land on your site. How many leave right away which is known as bouncing? Do they dig deeper? What page do you want them to click through to? When they get there do they convert? These are the questions analytics tries to answer and the tools available can be quite complex. Google offers many tools and reporting features that you can combine to create meaningful and insightful reports. Three things Google will advise you is needed to get the most out of analytics is to setup conversions, filters, and groupings.