Web analytics is essential to any type of search engine marketing, particularly your PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. It’s imperative to know where your traffic is coming from, the density of traffic, and the time of the day your traffic is densest.
You want to know what someone is typing into Google or Bing to pull your page from search engines, what links they clicked on and where those links came from. The amount of traffic and the conversion rate are equally important.
Analytics Guide the Foundation of Your Content
Once we give you the how, why, where, when, and who of your traffic, you have the fundamental keys that will create your stellar content that leads and converts your traffic into a sustainable business model. Once you know what the keywords that people are using to reach your website, you will be able to use long-tail as well as short-tail keywords and phrases that will help you guide the key points of your content.
This is also important in your PPC campaigns. By analyzing your traffic, how long a person stays on the site, if they end up calling your business (phone call tracking is the best way to tie this all together), you can ensure that you are using the best strategy in your PPC campaigns to increase your conversions and ROI.
Establishes Relevancy and Legitimacy
When people use certain words and links and find your site, they want relevancy and legitimacy. They want to find what they were looking for and from reliable sources. They tend to get upset and take their business elsewhere when they are not being provided what they were seeking. By analyzing your site and how people are finding your site, you can be sure to create content that will not only educate but also help your potential or current clients.
Organic and Sustainable Traffic
Pay Per Click campaigns are helpful when you want to get a large amount of traffic but you also need to have the accompanying organic traffic. With effective analytics, you can develop your organic content. Organic content persists and can actually increase in exposure over time, generating traffic longer than PPC. However, the best strategies combine a pay per click campaign with analytics and leverage that data to build the foundation of your SEO strategy. The data that can be accumulated through even just a test PPC program is invaluable in identifying what your target customers are looking for and what traffic converts best.
Legitimacy and Authenticity Equals Conversion and Retention
Remember this: traffic is good, but conversions are better. Traffic plus conversions equal revenue or value. People do not click on random things for no reason. The art of SEM relies on certain visitors searching for specific things. Gimmicks generally bring in people through mistake or curiosity (or get you in trouble with search engines), but people do sometimes end up at a site that they did not really want to visit. Analytics removes the need to use tricks to bring in traffic illegitimately. Using legit methods establishes goodwill and trust as well as customer retention.
Why Businesses Hire An Expert for Web Analytics
You want your PPC and SEO campaigns to run smoothly, and a part of doing that inherently relies on the definition of your analytics. As a business owner, you probably don’t have the time to devote to learning the science of your Google analytics. Running your business, managing your team, and focusing on your core competencies is more important than personally analyzing your search engine marketing efforts. And ultimately, the best use of your time is to serve your customers. Hiring a qualified and trusted SEM agency to help is the best way to get value out of your search engine marketing.
If you need a hand with your web analytics, feel free to reach out to us for a free consultation. Metric-driven marketing (aka web analytics) is the heart and soul of our company; we trudge through the data so that you don’t have to.