photo credit: thorinside

To expand from the Advanced SEO post I want to share some analytics metrics that can be used to help understand your search marketing campaigns, and their success in various arenas.

Here are some commonly available metrics you can use to track your organic search campaigns:

1. Referring Domains. Who sends your traffic? Major search engines often make up a large percentage of traffic for many sites. However, you should also pay attention to what other sites send referrals. Your referrals can help measure link building success and find new possible link relationships by cataloging site themes and verticals that you may be able to generate buzz through. Knowing your audience is one of the first steps in link-baiting campaigns.
2. Top Referring keywords. There are millions of people that are using search engines each day. That means that there are searches that will never cross your mind to target that you just naturally speak to. Search your logs to find these frequent constructions that may help you expand your visibility and better focus where you point your campaigns in the future.
3. Click paths. If you see many people end up in the same section, or page, of your site with in a few clicks, it would indicate that there’s an opportunity to engage people more effectively by creating more targeted content for that theme.
4. Paid vs. Natural. If you are seeing more than 30% of your traffic from paid search you should be looking into driving traffic in other ways. Paid search is great for measured ROI and immediate pay off, but it lacks the longevity of referral and search traffic. On the other side of the coin a paid campaign can help you collect data on long-tail searches more quickly and jump start you SEO campaigns by putting immediate visibility on your new content.
5. Geographic referrals. For marketing campaigns that include offline advertising geo-targeting is very important to establish the results. You can pair the airing (printing) of offline promotions with changes in traffic by region. When you section out these groups you may find opportunities to create region specific promotions (landing pages or service offerings) to maximize your value.
6. Visiting trends. Tracking seasonality is an often-overlooked metric. Your visitor trends should be looked at in relation to expected changes in your business. You should compare current trends with past trends, search trends, and economic trends to get the most value.
7. Top Landing Pages. The first step in determining your top landing pages should be to sectionalize your data. Look at organic, paid, and referral traffic as separate. Landing page should also be paired with click path, if you are creating common paths you should be looking at how to improve customer experience along that path, or by better targeting the path end in your organic/paid campaigns.
8. Bounce Rate. This metric is how many people arrive on a page and immediately leave. Good bounce rates vary greatly depending on your vertical and traffic source. What is important in determining this value is to pair bounce rate with another metric. Find a connection so you can make a clear assessment of what aspect of the page is losing the customer. It may be that users can’t find what they want, that some portion of your page is broken, or a number of issues. The important information you get from bounce rate is, largely, in conjunction with another metric.
9. Browser type. Do you have a mobile version of your site? If you are seeing a growth in mobile browsers it may be time.
10. Conversion Rates. This is the 900-pound gorilla of metrics, the performance indicator that is used to measure changes in other metrics. It is always there for you, weighing on your mind, do the visitors do what you want? How often? Those are our conversions. I put this metric last for a reason. Even though it is the first thing on your mind it should not be the first metric you address. Take the time to understand what one of the other metrics is saying, and then pair it with conversion rate. When you make the change measure both and see how one affects the other.

Measuring organic success can be difficult for some people to conceptualize. Start by taking one or two of the common metrics and comparing two of you high traffic pages. Find what metrics they are successful on and use them as a bar. When you introduce new content compare the results of the new content to your existing data.

Analytics are good for more than tracking; they can be used to help define your strategy to incorporate strengths that you were not aware of. Looking into your analytics before you start keyword research can be very valuable in choosing your target terms intelligently. Landing Pages, Keywords, and Exit Pages as a team can show you what pages are strong, what content is strong and where you lose user engagement.

This week try using your analytics as directions, instead of as tracks left behind.