Segmenting Those Conversions In Analytics
Every so often i like to re-assess how i setup my Google Analytics dashboard and what information i should be concentrating on. After all analytics can be a mind-grenade at times!!
It should be noted i setup and track differently depending on the client and sector but in almost all cases there are levels or types of common information i want to know. For example every campaign has a focus on achieving an ROI or conversions for clients but what do we know about those conversions. Surely there would be a great deal of value in having a deeper understanding of your clients conversions and having quick access to it.
The dashboard in analytics is great because it allows you to add reports that you use regularly to it. Adding the right reports at the right detail can save you a great deal of energy and time. This is why i recently went back and looked at what i had on my dashboards and looked again at how i segmented conversions. I came up with some ideas but some of the more basic conversion segmentation approaches are well highlighted in the Art of SEO. Thats a book by the way and well worth the read. You can get it from my affiliate link below, wink wink. In there book they looked at segmenting conversions in the following ways:
Conversion By Keyword:
Pretty logical. This is something that i look at regularly and is crucial to every seo campaign. This is because you want to see whether the terms you are targeting are bringing any value (conversions).
The complexity and sheer level of data presented by analytics packages can often cause confusion and lead to mistakes. These mistakes are usually the result of misinterpretations and a lack clear goals. Before beginning any SEO campaigns it is important to set out some clear goals or KPI’s and have a defined plan of action. You need to know what you are measuring and what you are trying to achieve. Without this knowledge you will often get little from your analytics data.
Of course there are a couple of packages out there to track your websites performance, with Google analytics being the most popular. Yahoo’s offering has also started to get some attention while some higher end packages such as Omniture exist.
Some of the most common analytics mistakes can be found below:
Twitter was undoubtedly one of last years biggest talking points and is used by millions of people around the world. The explosion in popularity of Twitter has lead to some weird and wonderful apps being developed and i thought i would share a few with you.
Foamee
This one is pure genius. It lets you track who owes you a drink. When you owe someone a beer, send a message to Foamee in the format “@ioubeer @twitterscreenname “reason beer is owed”. Your IOU will then show up on the Foamee homepage for all to see. Novel idea but im personally not particularly fussed about asking for drinks back.
No SEO campaign would be complete without extensive testing and the guys over at ABtests.com have been highlighting some great examples of split testing. I wanted to use this post to highlight some of the things they have been doing and show how essential testing has become.
It is easy in life and especially SEO to make assumptions. Assumptions can be costly in SEO as tactics that have worked in one place won’t necessarily work in another. This is because target audiences in different markets expect very different things and have completely different mind sets. A good SEO will understand these mind sets and test different alternatives on a site.
I find this one of the most interesting aspects of SEO because you often find things that you wouldn’t expect. A simple change in the positioning of text or an image can dramatically improve conversions for example. There was also a great example on abtests.com recently for a site called 5ftShelf.
This is a new initiative from the Google Analytics team and see’s experts Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski answer questions posted on Google message boards. Most of the questions are based on Analytics however they do answer some questions on other Google tools.
It’s great that Google is starting to provide new ways to support its users and i believe this could be a good way to get answers to those more advanced questions. The video format also enables Google to provide demonstrations to help answer questions. This is ideal as it sometimes difficult to follow long sets of instructions in forums.
Link building is a big part of SEO and having the right link building tools can help improve both the effectiveness and speed of the process. There are many tools out there which provide different functionality and serve different purposes. I find there isn’t one tool out there that does everything and it is therefore important to use a selection of tools. The best tools are often paid but well worth the investment.
Of course the list of tools could be endless for this post however i am going to list the ones i use regularly and find most useful.
SEO SpyGlass
SEO SpyGlass is a desktop tool that lets you analyse the backlinks of your competitors. I tend to use this tool at the beginning of a project and look for patterns between top ranking competitors. The great thing about this tool is that you can get it to list a range of key attributes next to each link. For example what type of link it is, what page rank it has and the exact anchor text used.
Once i have run SEO Spyglass i like to add the key links from the research into a spreadsheet. I don’t think its worth getting all the links the competition has as you need to differentiate yourself in some way but helps you identify and target the authority links. SEO SpyGlass is a paid tool and it might be worth purchasing their entire suite. The rank tracking software in the suite is very good.
About Mark Mayne
Manchester based SEO consultant who specialises in online marketing and PPC. Mark currently works for PushON ltd, one of the north west's top online marketing companies and has helped numerous companies boost their online profiles.
