Web Analytics & SEO - Go Hand-in-Hand
Let us start of with the correlation that SEO and Web Analytics seeks and how important these are in the field of Business.
The WWW is the home for millions of online businesses that compete against each other for top Search Engine Optimization (SEO) page renks. So What sets your businesses apart from your compettitors.? and what will attract the users to visit your website or Search engine to rank your site at the top.?. Before planning your SEO Campaign yu should have a fair idea of your targeted audience and how they navigate thrpugh the Web - i.e Web Analytics. By Aligining your web site to improve your user experience as a result of Web Analytics, you'll increase the SEO ranking.
If you want to see successful return from SEO, then you'll nedd to step back and consider the construction design of your website as the starting point. Web analytics is all about understanding the user behavior over a website, which gives the insight into how the further enhancement for your site to improve the user experience. Web Analytics keeps track of all the user actions over the web site. From this records a quantitative report is being compiled providing the Web site performance, which inturn your website can be improved, in turn a boost for SEO.
In short, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of constructing your site's architecture and using relevant keywords within your content to ensure that your site shows up high in search results for those keywords.
Web analytics is basically a collection of the statistics for your site, such as how many unique visitors, location of visitors, type of browsers they are using, etc. Interestingly, Web analytics can be used to view what keywords are being used by visitors to come to your site, so analytics are often used to determine which keywords you will be optimizing for.
Most of them thinking that once website being listed at the top in the natural seach list the job is done no need analytics. But the foremost thing is that once you've optimized (SEOed) your website, you go back to analytics and look at what's working and what's there to optimize further.
You need to remember that SEO is a journey, not a destination. This means that you'll have to continuously use your web analytic tools to analyze your site and fine tune your SEO strategy. It's an ongoing task that you should turn into a structured process t ensure you get good results out of it.
Web analytics is basically a collection of the statistics for your site, such as how many unique visitors, location of visitors, type of browsers they are using, etc. Interestingly, Web analytics can be used to view what keywords are being used by visitors to come to your site, so analytics are often used to determine which keywords you will be optimizing for.
Hope this post tells all about the hand-in-hand correlation of Web Analytics and SEO...
Web Analytics..???
The web analytics is the measurement, the analysis and the reporting of users behavior in order to understand and optimize the use of your website. The web analytics aims to increase the profitability of your website.
The above stated definition is off Common can be found in Wikipedia. But we as a Analyst should use to market ourselves ourself to executives :
Web analytics is an unbiased discipline that actively finds and validates business opportunities by studying the habits and behavior of users, competitors, and trends in the “Big picture"
This describes what web analytics is in terms of output and value (and process), not just in terms of execution..
Most sites are not lucky enough to get explicit user feedback. The nature of the web makes it easy for visitors to find you, but also for them to find similar sites. If they get frustrated or cannot seem to make your site work the way they want to, get confused or feel their privacy is being invaded, they will likely move on to another site.
The web allows you to publish your business or content to a very large audience, very easily. But that does not change the need to make sure you understand your audience. By connecting with your visitors, you make them feel more comfortable. If your site “thinks” the way they do, it becomes natural and they will recommend it to friends. Web analytics can give you the power to know how your visitors use your site, to know how they react to your site (or changes on your site) and to improve the quality of the site. The better your visitors feel about using your site, the better your bottom line will be.
Steering Clear with Common Terminologies...
These are the most predominant terminologies and the metrics involved in the Web Analytics. After going through the below post it will be clear...
A metric can apply to three different Universe...
Aggregate - Total Site Traffic for a defined period of time.
Segmented - A Subset of the site traffic for a defined period of time, filtered in some way to gain greater analytical insight. e.g., by campaign (e-mail, banner, PPC, affiliate), by visitor type (new vs. returning, repeat buyers, high value), by referrer.
Individual - Activity if a Single Web Visitor for a defined period of time.
There are three types of Web analytics metrics – counts, ratios, and KPIs:
• Count — the most basic unit of measure; a single number, not a ratio. Often a whole number
(Visits = 12,398), but not necessarily (Total Sales= $52,126.37.).
• Ratio — typically, a count divided by a count, although a ratio can use either a count or a ratio in the numerator or denominator. (An example of a ratio fabricated from ratios is “Stickiness.”) Usually, it is not a whole number. Because it’s a ratio, “per” is typically in the name, such as “Page Views per Visit.” A ratio’s definition defines the ratio itself, as well as any underlying metrics.
• KPI (Key Performance Indicator) — while a KPI can be either a count or a ratio, it is frequently a ratio. While basic counts and ratios can be used by all Website types, a KPI is infused with business strategy — hence the term, “Key” — and therefore the set of appropriate KPIs typically differs between site and process types.
A fourth type of definition is included for terms that describe concepts instead of numbers...
• Dimension - A general source of data that can be used to define various types of segments or counts and represents a fundamental dimension of visitor behavior or site dynamics. Some examples are event and referrer. They can be interpreted the same as counts above, but typically they must be further qualified or segmented to be of actual interest. Therefore these define a more general class of metrics and represent a dimension of data that can be associated with each individual visitor.
List of Basic Terminologies and Metrics
Page
A web page is a document that is created in html that shows up on the Internet when you type in, or go to the web page’s address.
Page Views
The units of measurement for usage of the service. A page view is used when the UTM is executed on a web page accessed by a visitor, and processed as part of a profile. A view will be incurred for each instance of the UTM on the web page, and for each profile receiving information from the UTM for such web page.
Page View per Visit
Calculated by the number of Page Views / Visits in the same reporting period.
Visitors:
Unique Visitors
Represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A unique visitor is determined using cookies; the first time someone visits your site, a first party persistent cookie is set in their browser. This cookie lasts any where from several months to several years. Each time that person visits your site that cookie identifies them as the same browser.
New vs. Returning Visitors
When somebody visits your site for the first time, the visit is categorized as ‘visit from a new visitor.’ If this user has browsed your website before, the visit is categorized as ‘visit from a returning visitor.’ In other words, absolute unique visitors counts visitors, whereas new vs. returning counts by visit type.
Repeat Visitors
A repeat visitor is the number of unique visitors with activity consisting of two or more visits to a site during a reporting period.
Visit Duration
Visit duration is the length of time in a visit. Calculation is typically the time of the last activity in the session minus the time of the first activity of the session. When there is only one piece of activity in a session (a single-page or single event visit), no visit duration is typically reported.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page is a bounce rate. You can use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages are not relevant to your visitors.
Entry Page
The first page in the visit or session is the entry page.
Landing Page
A page intended to identify the beginning of the user experience resulting from a defined marketing effort.
Exit Page
An exit page is the last page on a site accessed during a visit, signifying the end of a visit or session.
Visit Duration
The Length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session.
Referrer
The referrer is the page URL that originally generated the request for the current page view or object.
Internal Referrer
The internal referrer is a page URL that is internal to the website or a web-property within the website as defined by the user.
External Referrer
The external referrer is a page URL where the traffic is external or outside of the website or a web-property defined by the user.
Search Referrer
The search referrer is an internal or external referrer for which the URL has been generated by a search function.
Visit Referrer
Original Referrer
The original referrer is the first referrer in a visitor's first session, whether internal, external or null.
Operating System (“OS”)
The software that communicates with computer hardware on the most basic level. The operating system is what allocates memory, processes tasks, accesses disks and peripherals, and serves as the user interface.
Web Browser
Or simply a browser, is a software program used to locate and display web pages. The most commonly used are Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, and Netscape Navigator.
Demographics
Demographics are the characteristics of human population and population segments, especially when used to identify consumer markets.
e.g., age, sex, ethnicity, religion, and income.
Traffic:
Referral Traffic
A report that allows you to see which domains (and pages in those domains) are referring traffic to your site, how much traffic they’re referring, which landing pages are the most popular referral destinations, and the extent to which those referred visitors interact with your site.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is a report that allows you see which of your URLs are the most popular destinations for direct traffic: which URLs people can easily remember (google.com), which addresses appear most often in auto-completion, or which of your pages are bookmarked the most.
Search Traffic
Search traffic: Organic traffic can come from an unpaid search engine results link, a referral from another website (such as a blog) and direct traffic. There is also paid traffic, which can come from AdWords, paid search engine keywords, or paid ad campaigns from non-AdWords providers.
The number of click-through for a specific link divided by the number of times that link was viewed.
Page Views Per Visit
The number of page views in a reporting period divided by number of visits in the same reporting period.
Events
Any logged or recorded action that has a specific date and time assigned to it by either the browser or server.
Conversion
These are of the most common terminologies & the metric terms used in Analyzing and optimizing a Website..
Web Analytics - Entire Flow of Business Process
In this post I will be covering the steps involved in Web Analytics. Web Analytics in an organization should be just like a development cycle starting from Define phase to Reporting. Below is a visualization of an ideal Web Analytics process. This process is more suited for tech organizations which already have defined KPIs with regular weekly/monthly releases of new features on their website and also to the people who respond to the RFPs will find the below post much useful.
This phase includes Requirement Gathering, Design Business Requirement, Define Roles & Responsibilities, Preparing Solution design documents.
1) Requirement Gathering: This is the start of the Web Analytics process and it deals with an Analyst collecting tracking requirements from stakeholders. Similarly this step will also involve review of feature specifications of new items that are part of a release cycle. An example of a new feature can be a new page being added on the website or a new outgoing/external link being added or even an A/B Test.
2) Design Business Requirement: Once all the requirements have been gauged, the Analyst will create a Tracking Plan/Analytics plan/ Design to define the variables for Web Analytics. All the business Key Performance Indicators and Goals/Objectives of the Websites will be defined in this phase. This is usually an excel document containing a matrix of all the variables and their corresponding values. This deliverable is the Requirements Specifications Document.
3) Roles & Responsibility: The roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders/analysts working on the project are defined in this stage. This defines the project team structure and their deliverables.
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| Assigning Responsibility Key Role |
4) Design Document: A Solution Design Document is a main document of the web analytics implementation. The design phase begins with preparing solution design or reference document. This deliverable is Solution Design Document.
The Second is the DESIGN Phase
Designing the tags for data collection
Based on the Design Document the tags are generated and placed on to the Head or Body with the parameter need to be tracked. Using the page tagging of Web Analytics tool, the visitor browsing and activity data on our website is collected. The javascript tags are defined for all the parameters listed in the solution design document.
The Third Step is the DEPLOY Phase
Implementing the Tags for Data Collection
The Web Analytics tools use a special JavaScript tag that we place on our web pages to collect visitor activity data. When a visitor browses our website page, this JavaScript tag initiates interactions between the visitor’s browser and Web Analytics tool. The tag collects data about the visitor’s browsing behavior and sends this information to the web analytics tool.
The designed JavaScript tag will be inserted on each page of the website. Once the tags are deployed on the website, we can begin viewing reports of our visitor browsing activity on our website. Reports are generally available 24 hours after the tags are deployed.
The validation checklist document has the current list of tags, the potential issues and their resolution methodology in place. This is done to ensure that the analyst is reporting on the correct data to stakeholders or business heads.
The validation of Web Analytics tool installation can be done by:
- Checking the tags accuracy: We can check the tags accuracy by using debugging tools. There are many free web analytics debugging tools available like Firebug etc… In the future, I will write a separate post on this.
- By reports/dashboards: We can review our reports and dashboards which can tell us whether our tags are correct or not. But better to follow the first method so that to have accuracy in place before the reporting starts.
Once the Validation checklist is over the Design Document is updated with the notes from Validation Document.
The Fourth step is AUDIT
Once the site goes live, the auditing is done every 2-3 weeks. At the end of every week, data is collected and audit is done. This step evaluates the website for proper implementation of tags. It identifies the Duplicate tags, Incorrect & Missing tags.
The Fifth and the Final step is REPORTING
After the data is found to be clean, it is the responsibility of the Analyst to report numbers resulting from the feature which went live during the previous release cycle. The Analyst will also provide analysis (explaining the data or conversion etc) and possible recommendations/next steps to improve the website even more.
This, according to me is an ideal end to end process which organizations should be following to manage Web Analytics. It is vital for a big organization to incorporate these steps in their overall plan for Web Analytics to ensure smooth functioning.
After the data is found to be clean, it is the responsibility of the Analyst to report numbers resulting from the feature which went live during the previous release cycle. The Analyst will also provide analysis (explaining the data or conversion etc) and possible recommendations/next steps to improve the website even more.
This, according to me is an ideal end to end process which organizations should be following to manage Web Analytics. It is vital for a big organization to incorporate these steps in their overall plan for Web Analytics to ensure smooth functioning.
