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Actionable Google Analytics for Beginners
Alright welcome to WhiteFireSEO’s screencast, our first ever! Today we’re going to be talking about Google Analytics, and a couple of actionable points that you can take and start running with immediately. So yes, you are going to get an inside peek at the traffic of my site, don’t be too critical, it’s only been live a few months.
There are three things that I want to cover. I want to define what all of these terms mean, what you should be looking for and the red flags you should be seeing there. Then we’re going to talk about how to filter out your own traffic so you have data that’s true to actual traffic and not including you going through and reoptimizing and things like that. Then we’re going to finish off with a technique to see what keywords are sending you traffic and how to reoptimize for those.
Visits is obviously people who are visiting your site. This is different than visitors because a single visitor can visit multiple times and that will show up as separate visits, but as the same visitor. It does this by tracking the cookie it puts on their browsers. Pageviews is how many pages that they’re looking at. Of all the visitors, that’s how many pageviews you got. Pages per visit is obviously how many pages your visitors view on their visits. Bounce rate is how quickly someone leaves your site. So, a high bounce rate shows that they’ve clicked into your site either from a search result or a referring link or something like that and then bounced immediately back out. So, either they hit the back button or the home button, they just left your site. So, visits, visitors, pageviews. Pretty much, you want all of those to be high. It is different in some cases, like with pageviews. They can be low if it’s e-commerce that you’re looking at. You want people to come in, get convinced to buy your product, buy your product and leave. If you’re not focused on content, pageviews doesn’t necessarily have to be high. Same goes for bounce rate. If you’re a primarily content-based site, you want your bounce rate to be low, because you want people to be coming into your site and seeing multiple pages, reading related articles and so on. And for content-based, obviously that should be lower and mine is not wonderful, so I’ll hope you’ll forgive me for that.
So let’s go on now to how to filter out your own traffic. This is the new version of Google analytics. The new layout. And if you’re not in this layout, you should be. Up here at the top you can see “Old Version” and right here if you’re in the old version you should see “Try out the new version” or something to that effect. And you can click there and you’ll see this layout. So come over here and click on this little cog. Click on that and that will take you to this page. You want to scroll down to the middle and go to “Filters.” I already have this filter in place so I’ll just show you how it’s done. Click new filter right there. You want to know your own IP address. Go to any website, “what’s my IP” or anything like that. Once you have that, this is where you’ll put it. Have it exclude traffic from these IP addresses. So exclude traffic from the IP addresses that are equal to and you put yours there. Hit save and it won’t update retroactively. Meaning, you’re gonna have to wait and you’ll see the effect of it on your future traffic. It won’t update automatically. So that’s how to filter out your own traffic.
Let’s move onto something that you can do immediately with the analytics here. Go to “Standard Reporting” and you’ll see a whole slew of info. We’re going to focus on one specific point: how to reoptimize your site. How to know when you should be targeting other terms.
So come over here to traffic sources, come down to search engine optimization, and hit queries. Now, this can be less than optimal due to Google’s recent SSL search enforcement, so sometimes you’ll see the (not provided) keyword pop up. So come over here and I’d narrow it down to the last month or so. From Oct 13 all the way over here to Nov 13. Apply that.
And we have a bunch of terms that are currently sending traffic to your site, or that you can see, the impressions mean that your site is showing up for a search for that. You want to look at Clickthrough Rate, which is CTR right here. If you have a high clickthrough rate, then people who see your site in the search results for that term are clicking right through to your page. One note here, to get this page right here to show up you will need to connect your Google Analytics account to your Google Webmasters Tools account. If you don’t have that set up, then shoot me a message on Twitter and I’ll help you out with that. It should be fairly straightforward. My twitter handle is @mmonsen7. And I’ll give you some help there. What you want to look for in this page is a clickthrough rate that is significant. So when you get down here, you’re obviously getting some clicks in this area, but you’re not getting a whole lot of them. So a .05% clickthrough rate is pretty miserable when there’s 110,000 times that you’re showing up. So, you want a high clickthrough rate and ideally you want your average position to be as close to 1 as possible. If it’s already at 1 then there’s no reason to reoptimize, you’re already at the #1 position for that term. And you’re getting as much traffic from it as you can. For example, this is one that I did not too long ago. The #15 term here is search engine commands. It has a 7% clickthorugh rate, we’re at position 7, right around there, so if we have a high clickthrough rate and we’re not at the #1 position, that means we’re already getting traffic for a term that we’re not completely optimized for. So whether that means you want to retarget the keywords on the page or build links to that page with the keywords in the anchor text or whatever. Ok, that is everything we’ve got for today. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for more updates.
