While SEO changes are continuously being rolled out, there are many tools that can help you in determining whether the SEO strategies employed by the Internet marketing agency, or even by you, are working or not. One way of knowing how the overall traffic acquisition works is making changes based on the analytics. What is analytics nonetheless and how the results of such will make your campaign more successful? These and more will be given answer to in this article.

 

What is analytics?

Web analytics may refer to the tools, processes or results for studying web-related statistics. The most famous web traffic analytics tool online is Google Analytics. Google Analytics can provide various statistics relating to the volume of website visitors including where they come from, which pages the visit and what they do after a visit. Google also constantly rolls out new features to make data-related insights more in-depth.

Google Analytics is mostly advised to website owners who are running their own AdWords campaign. The tool monitors web traffic via advertisements. It can also determine the returns of your AdWord advertising investments. Simply, it can identify if the campaign is earning and by how much.

Results are presented as statistical data that can be confusing at times especially for first-time users. Nevertheless, once you understand what the aggregate data mean, you’ll make more sense of what the results can do to improve your business in general.

 

How Google Analytics works?

Google Analytics churns out plenty of data and reports. However, here are some of the most important ones.

Traffic chart

The traffic chart is the first thing you’ll notice as it should be. The chart is actually the most important, giving website owners an overall visual overview of the website is currently performing traffic-wise. It can be adjusted based on specific period or dates and compare the charts from different periods. With this, it would be easier to know why your site performed more optimally on a specific period. You may then repeat or improve a successful campaign.

Site usage

Site usage breaks down the traffic information into digestible chunks. There are a total of six subsections. However, there are only three that can provide you with the data that you need.

1) Visitors

This section provides the total number of users visiting your website. You can determine whether the website is increasing in terms of popularity and conversion.

2) Page views

This section details the total number of times that a particular web page is accessed. You can then determine why that web page attracts more visitors than other pages and strategize accordingly.

3) New visitors

This section gives the total number of new visitors. This is critical to know whether your website in increasing in terms of reach or not.

 

Each subsection has its own report based on countries. This is specifically critical for those websites that intend to or is currently targeting the international market. For instance, the website owner may choose to provide language options based on from which country the visitors came from. The report also provides information whether the traffic is acquired through which channels. The three channels are:

• direct access,
• search engine query, and
• link.

The information will be helpful in further optimizing the website.

 

Thereby, analytics and specifically Google Analytics is an essential tool in guiding and gauging the success of websites. However, you can only make sense of the data provided if you know what relevance it will have to your SEO campaign. If it means going through each chart and report, then so be it if this is the only way to make the SEO efforts more successful.

 

Image credit: Google.co.uk