Having analytics is one thing; knowing how to interpret them is quite another. Here are a few ways that you can gather actionable insights from the SEO analytics that you pay for or gather from your free service.
Data Points
You can make certain conclusions from individual bits of data such as landing page traffic, bounce rate, organic traffic and behavior flow. You can also make more in-depth conclusions by combining these factors with each other. Let's go over individual conclusions first for some of the most important analytical data.
Landing page traffic - From this metric, you can determine if your ads are serving the right customers. If you hired a search engine optimization company, matchup the actual landing page traffic statistics to their estimates and see if they are serving your needs.
Bounce rate - From the bounce rate, you can determine if the content on your landing page is interesting to the people that your ads are serving online. If your bounce rate is high for a particular page, then know that you need to change the content on that page.
Organic traffic - This metric can help you to see how your public relations campaign is working. The Internet has a great deal of potential for low-cost, viral content that can minimize your marketing expenses. Organic traffic is a great way to see how your PR investments are behaving as opposed to your paid ads and PPC campaigns.
Match & Compare
You can also gain a great deal of insight from comparing metrics against each other. For instance, if you combine the predictive analytics of landing page traffic and bounce rate, you can determine which particular keywords in a multivariate campaign are working most efficiently in bringing qualified traffic to your website. There are many other conclusions that can be made - perhaps the best way is to learn how to organize the data so that you can see the distinctions and overlap for yourself in a visual way.
Matching up organic traffic against landing page traffic can help you to determine if your defined landing page should actually be farther down in the queue on your website. If you test other parts of your website with the same analytics, you may actually be able to come up with a more effective landing page that shortens the sales process and also increases site retention.
Matching organic traffic against a bounce rate can help to determine if your content is appropriate. Organic content is content that displays a great deal of confidence in your website from search engine algorithms as well as from human visitors (see the latest analysis of Google Penguin in order to understand how human behavior affects search engine ranking). However, if your bounce rate is high, it means that some content on that landing page is not what the customer expects from the website. If this is the case, you can also expect that your search engine ranking will drop dramatically if you do not fix it.
Dashboards
One of the best ways for visualizing analytics is an Excel dashboard.
Dashboards can be created from numerical and text data in an Excel spreadsheet. After that data is placed into the dashboard, it can be further analyzed and modified in order to compensate for outliers and questionable inputs. From this standpoint, a viewer will be able to make decisions much more easily than with simple text and numerical data. Remember, the success you see in business largely will depend on how well you interpret the insights in your analytics, make the most of them!
Tools to help you get Google Analytics data and create dashboards:
or, if you want to do it all yourself, check Easy Google Analytics API for Excel.