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These slides have been presented at Superweek, October 2012 in Sinaia, Romania by Sébastien Monnier, expert in SEO and Web Analytics
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DON’T TRUST YOUR ANALYTICS
Even though … it’s your Best Friend
Who am I?
• Since 2000 : freelance webmaster, researcher, teacher…
• 2006 – 2009: Google Search Quality and Google Analytics teams (Dublin, Ireland)
• Since 2009: SEO in France. Founder of the SEO Agency Woptimo
• 2011 : Co-founder of Search Quality Alliance
Agenda
1.Data gathering and accuracy
2.Keywords
3.Beyond your website
A LITTLE ANECDOTE
Zero Bounce Rate !!
Bounce rate below 10% is almost impossible
The blogger had the GA code 2 times in the source …
DATA GATHERING AND ACCURACY1. Data collection
2. Visits, PageViews, Unique Visitors : what’s the best choice?
3. Returning visitors
4. Too much traffic?
5. GWT and GA
6. Negative Analytics & Stupidity
What tool do you use?
Is your tool server-side or client-side?
Number of hits ≠ Number of visits
Each tool has its own definition of visits, PageViews, Bounce rate…
Accuracy
Or just use 2 Web Analytics tools
Is your tool accurate?
Check your data with several sources Actual sale vs Analytics Number of PageViews vs ads impression Adwords data vs Analytics data
What metric to chose?
It depends on what you want to achieve !
What do you want to do ?
Check notoriety and engagement Unique Visitors and Returning Visitors
Impress your boss / ads publisher
PageViews (or even go for server hits!)
Daily check Number of visits segmented per source of traffic
Ghost visitors …
Have you ever noticed- Visits from an Adwords campaign you stopped ages ago ?- Huge number of visits for a very long tail keywords?
Master your source attribution
To avoid this, segment only New Visitors from Organic
If a visitor comes to your site from a defined source of traffic (Google organic, Google Adwords, referring sites…)
Next times he’ll visit entering urls or via bookmarks It won’t count as direct traffic but GA will use the original source !
A keywords entered one time in Google can lead to hundreds of visits by the same browser !
Visit’s duration
Your organic landing pages can be a page that is not even indexed !! (Link)
A new visit is counted every time you leave the site for 30 minutes or more and come back to it
Let’s say you have a Flash game site that do not need to refresh between 2 games…
Every time a user visits another page ater playing games (to save his score for example), a new visit will be recorded.
Negative Analytics and Stupidity
Evil competitors can use your tracking code on other websites, or just send http request with our GA code …
Stupid webmasters can also make a copy-paste mistakes…
Evil Black-Hat technique
Work-around
Check hostname in your report
Create a filter including only your hostname
Too much traffic?
If you have more than 10K visits a day, your GA will get really slower and advanced segments won’t be accurate.
Do not rely on number of visits for big websites’ segments. Only check big pictures
Work around
Create several profiles using include filters
Check you data on a smallest time range
Webmaster Tools
On GA don’t confuse Webmaster Tools report and GA reports !
RECHECK YOUR KEYWORDS• Broad , Exact, Phrase?• Adwords vs SEO• Adwords reports• Ranking• Keywords and « not provided »• Universal Search
Keywords Search Volume
Use broad for very specific keywords Use phrase for expression and compare with exact it gives you an idea
of the long tail potential of this expressionUse Exact for most keywords but keep in mind that 0 does not mean this
keyword is totally useless.
Adwords and SEO
If you don’t properly tag your campaign or link Adwords to GA : your Adwords keywords will show up in organic search !
Check your current data and your past dataCheck if you have several Adwords accounts. You can now link several
Adwords to 1 GA account.
Adwords Keywords
Matched Search Query may be one of the most efficient report for Adwords.
Check keywords actually searched, and not just the keyword you targeted
≠
Keywords ranking
Ranking in which city?Universal ranking or web ranking?Who’s ranking before you? Is there any Adwords?
Keywords ranking
Good tips on what happens in Google SERP but should not be your SEO main objective.
However, ….
Not provided : a threat for good SEO
Up to 50% SEO visits impacted It’s a Google Search policy, not a GA : all tools are impactedOnly way to work around is checking landing pages and … check the
ranking
Universal Search in GA
Everything is merged into one keyword report. Whether you come from Images, Maps, News, Shopping …
Filters can be used for news.gg / shopping.ggNo filters possible for integrated universal search (except for images)Universal search merged in Webmaster Tools too…
BEYOND YOUR WEBSITE1. Referral
2. Number of backlinks
3. PageRank
4. Alexa and alii
Referral on GA
You don’t have parameters of the referral url ! Can be very annoyingWork around with a filter « exact referral »
PageRank
Toolbar PageRank is not the actual PageRankNo frequent updateNot inline with ranking or link quality
Number of backlinks
Number of backlinks is quite uselessNumber of domain is a little more cleverQuick change can be due to tools update rather than actual changesTry to measure backlinks quality rather than focusing on quantity
Beware of Alexa and tools like that
Some interesting data for big websites, but don’t rely on it too much if you have less than 500K visits a month
Don’t install Alexa toolbar on your computer !!!
If we still have more time
Other common mistakes
• GA code only on some pages• No tracking in your e-mail• Your office IP not excluded• Your GA code twice• Goal configuration
• « useless » Goals• Goals counted twice
MERCI
@smonnier
Référencement Naturel Ergonomie WebAnalytics
Audit Intervention Formation
Ressources :
woptimo.com
@woptimo