A process can easily become a habit. A habit may not change without awareness or intervention.
Before it becomes a habit, a process should be adjusted to change along with new goals, constant learning, experimentation, and so on.
Considering your time in analytics, are you engaging in a process, or in an outdated habit?
That’s a real question that digital marketing practitioners should ask themselves. Inherently, marketers tend to be buried with work, reusing templates to speed up results. But many agencies lean on those templates a little too much, in my opinion.
Templates should never be written in stone.
If your company is pumping out canned reports, you’re not alone. I do the business development for our company and regularly ask prospects to explain or share the reports they’ve received in the past. Sometimes it’s truly discouraging, outdated, wasteful, and the reason businesses search for new SEO vendors.
Look—I’m all for scalability. It’s a huge help. But some things can’t be scaled and still be successful, especially in today’s SEO climate—or, frankly, marketing in general. Much of what was scalable in SEO prior to 2011 is now penalty-bait. Today’s analytics tools and platforms can slice and dice data faster than anything Ron Popeil ever sold, but the human element will always be necessary if you want your marketing to dominate.
Find the stories to tell
I like to tell stories. I’m real fun in the pub. What I’ve always loved about marketing is the challenge to not only find a story, but have that story change something for the better. I like adding my layer based on real data and experimenting.
Analytics work is all about finding the story. It’s detective work. It's equal parts Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and Indiana Jones. If you’re lucky, the story jumps out with very little digging. However, it’s more likely you’ll be going on some expeditions. It’s common to start with a hunch or random click through reports, but you need to always be looking for the story.
A great place to start is through client conversations. We schedule at least one monthly call with our clients, where it’s truly a discussion session. We get conversations going to pull intel out of the key stakeholders. Case in point: Recently, we discovered through an open discussion that one of our clients had great success with an earlier email campaign targeted to business owners. There was specific information customers positively responded to, which was helpful in recent content development on their website. It's amazing what you can learn by asking questions and simply listening to responses.
We should be true consultants, not report monkeys. Dive into the discussions started and enjoy the ride. I guarantee you’ll take note of a few ripe areas to review next time you log into your Google Analytics account.
An impromptu survey says it’s a time issue
Most SEO engagements are designed around a block of purchased hours. Hopefully the client understands they’re not only buying your time to complete SEO tasks, but also your expertise and analysis. If someone on your team were to say, “I don’t have time to do analysis because all my tasks used up their budget this month,” then you really need to question the value of the chosen tasks. Were they picked based on front-loaded analysis, or were they simply tasks pulled out of guesswork?
A few weeks ago I pushed a quick Survey Monkey survey out on Twitter and Linkedin. Thanks to a few retweets, 94 people responded (please consider the following results more directional than scientific—I’m well aware it’s a shallow survey pool). I asked two questions:
- If you work in-house or have clients, how often do you log into your clients’ analytics? (Multiple choices ranged from several times a day to a few times a month).
- Do you, or do you not, get enough time in Analytics to interpret the data?
The responses:
While some do make a habit of logging into analytics once or more times a day, more do not. Is it required to check under the hood every day? Personally, I believe it is—but your answer may vary on that one. If something went south overnight, I want to be aware before my client tells me. After all, that’s one of the things I’m paid for. I like the idea of being active—not reactive.
More notable is that most respondents didn’t feel they get enough time in analytics. That should absolutely change.
There was also a field for respondents to elaborate on their selections. There were several comments that jumped out at me:
“In house, day to day tasks and random projects prevent me from taking the deep dives in analytics that I feel are valuable.”
“It’s challenging to keep up with the changes and enhancements made in Google Analytics in particular, amongst other responsibilities and initiatives.”
“Too many things are on my plate for me to spend the time I know I should be spending in Google Analytics.”
“Finding the actionable info in Analytics always takes more time that expected—never enough time to crunch the numbers!”
“I log in to 'spot check' things but rarely do I get to delve into the data for long enough to suss out the issues and opportunities presented by the data.”
These results suggest that many marketers are not spending enough time with analytics. And possibly not because they don’t see the value, but simply because they don’t have time. “Either you run the day, or the day runs you (Jim Rohn)” is apropos here—you must make time. You need to get on top of all the people filling your plate. It’s not easy, but it needs to be done.
Get on top of those filling your plate. Kind of like professional crowd surfing.
Helpful resources
Dashboards are fantastic, but I rarely see them set up in analytics platforms. One of the best ways to get a quick glimpse of your key metrics are with dashboards. All good analytics platforms provide the ability to make custom dashboards. Get into work, grab a coffee, fire up the computer, click your dashboard bookmark. (I recommend that order!) Google Analytics, which most of us probably use, provides some decent options with their dashboards, though limited compared to enterprise analytics platforms.
However, this basic dashboard is the minimum you should review in analytics. We’ll get deeper soon.
Building these widgets are quite easy (I recently created a tutorial on my site). There are also websites that provide dashboards you can import into Google Analytics. Dashboard Junkie is a fun one. Here are some others from Econsultancy and Google themselves.
It’s not just analytics platforms that offer dashboards. There are several other vendors in the SEO space that port in analytics data and mesh with their own data—from Moz Analytics to SearchMetrics to Conductor to many, many others.
SEMrush has a unique data set that marketers should routinely review. While your traffic data in analytics will be truer, if you’re targeting pages you may be interested in monitoring keyword rank counts:
Are backlinks a target? Maybe you’d find Cognitive SEO’s dashboard valuable:
RankRanger is another SaaS we use. It’s become way more than just our daily rank tracking software. The data you can port in creates excellent snapshots and graphs, and strong dashboards:
It also offers other graphing functionality to make pretty useful views:
While some of the bigger platforms, like SearchMetrics and Conductor, make it easier to get a lot of information within one login, I’m still finding myself logging into several programs to get the most useful data possible. C’est la vie.
Analytics is your vehicle to identifying problems and opportunity
Remember, dashboards are simply the “quick and dirty” window into your site. They help spotlight drastic changes, and make your website’s general traction more visible. Certainly valuable for when your CMO corners you by the Keurig machine. It’s a state of the union, but doesn’t focus on subsections that may need attention.
Agencies and consultants tend to create SEO reports for their clients as a standard practice, though sometimes these reports become extremely boilerplate. Boilerplate reports essentially force you to look under the same rocks month after month. How can you get a bigger view of the world if you never leave your comfortable neighborhood? A new routine needs to be created by generating new reports and correlations, finding trends that were hidden, and using all the tools at your disposal (from Analytics to link tools to competitive tools).
Your analytics app is not a toy—it’s the lifeblood of your website.
Deeper dives with Google Analytics
Grouped pages lookup
A quick way to look at chunks of the site is by identifying a footprint in the URL and searching with that. For example, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages or Landing Pages. Then, in the search bar right below the graph, search for the footprint. For example, take www.mystoreisdabomb.com/blog/2015/ as a real URL. if you want to see everything in the blog, enter */blog/ into the search bar. This is especially useful in getting the temperature of an eCommerce category.
Segment sessions with conversions/transactions
So often in SEO we spend our time analyzing what’s not working or posing as a barrier. This report helps us take a look at what is performing (by leads or sales generated) and the customer behavior, channels, and demographic information that goes along with that. Then we can identify opportunities to make use of our success and improve our overall inbound strategy.
Below is a deeper dive into the conversions “Lead Generation” segment, although these same reports can just as aptly be applied to transactions. Ultimately, there are a lot of ways to slice and dice the analysis, so you’ll have to know what makes sense for your client, but here are three different reports from this segment that provided useful insights that will enhance our strategy.
- Conversions
One of the easy and most valuable ones! Directions: Under any report, go to Add a Segment > Sessions with Conversions > Apply.
- Demographics – age, gender, location
For example, our client is based in Pennsylvania, but is receiving almost as many request form submissions from Texas and New York, and has a high ratio of request form submissions to visitors for both of these other states. Given our client’s industry, this gives us ideas on how to market to these individuals and additional information the Texans may need given the long distance.
- Mobile – overview, device type, landing pages
For this client, we see more confirmation of what has been called the “micro-moment” in that our mobile users spend less time on the site, view less pages per visit, have a higher bounce rate, and are more likely to be new users (less brand affinity). This would indicate that the site is mobile optimized and performing as expected. From here, I would next go into mobile traffic segments to find pages that aren’t receiving a lot of mobile traffic, but are similar to those that are, and find ways to drive traffic to those pages as well.
- Acquisition
Here we’re looking at how the inbound channels stack up for driving conversions. Organic and Paid channels are neck and neck, although referral and social are unexpected wins (and social, glad we’ve proven your viability to make money!). We’ll now dig deeper into the referring sites and social channels to see where the opportunities are here.
Assisted conversions
There’s more to the story than last click. In Analytics, go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted conversions. Many clients have difficulty understanding the concept of attribution. This report seems to provide the best introduction to the world of attribution. Last click isn’t going to be replaced anytime soon, but we can start to educate and optimize for other parts of the funnel.
True stories from analytics detective work
Granted, this is not a post about favorite reports. But this is a post about why digging through analytics can open up huge opportunities. So, it’s real-life example time from Greenlane’s own experience!
Story 1: The Forgotten Links
The client is a big fashion brand. They’ve been a popular brick-and-mortar retail destination since the early 80s, but only went online in 1996. This is the type of company that builds links based on their brand ambassadors and trendy styles. SEO wasn’t the mainstream channel it is today, so it’s likely they had some serious architecture changes since the 90s, right?
For this company, analytics data can only be traced back about seven years. We thought, “Let’s take a look at what drove traffic in their early years. Let’s see if there were any trends that drove volume and sales where they may be slipping today. If they had authority then, and are slipping now, it might be easier to recoup that authority versus building from scratch.”
The good news—this brand had been able to essentially maintain the authority they launched with, as there were not any real noticeable gaps between search data then and search data today. But, in the digging, we uncovered a gem. We found a lot of URLs that used to draw traffic that are not on their tree today. After digging furthur, we found a redesign occurred in the late 90s. SEO wasn’t factored in, creating a ton of 404s. These 404s were not even being charted in Google Webmaster Tools, yet they are still being linked to today from external sites (remember, GWT is still quite directional in terms of the data they provide). Better yet, we pulled links from OSE and Majestic, and saw that thousands of forgotten links existed.
This is an easy campaign—create a 301 redirect matrix for those dead pages and bring those old backlinks to life.
But we kept wondering what pages were out there before the days where analytics was implemented. Using the Wayback Machine, we found that even more redesigns had occurred in the first few years of the site’s life. We didn’t have data for these pages, so we had to get creative. Using Screaming Frog, we crawled the Wayback Machine to pull out URLs we didn’t know existed. We fed them into the link tools, and sure enough, there were links there, too.
Story 2: To “View All” or Not To “View All”
Most eCommerce sites have pagination issues. It’s a given. A seasoned SEO knows immediately to look for these issues. SEOs use rel=”next” and “prev” to help Google understand the relationships. But does Google always behave the way we think they should? Golly, no!
Example 2 is a company that sells barware online. They have a lot of products, and tend to show only “page 1” of a given category. Yet, the analytics showed instances where Google preferred to show the view all page. These were long "view all" pages, which, after comparing to the “page 1” pages, showed a much lower bounce rate and higher conversions. Google seemed to prefer them in several cases anyway, so a quick change to default to “view all” started showing very positive returns in three months.
Story 3: Selling What Analytics Says to Sell
I have to change some details of this story because of NDAs, but once upon a time there was a jewelry company that sold artisan products. They were fond of creating certain kinds of keepsakes based on what sold well in their retail stores. Online, though, they weren't performing very well selling these same products. The website was fairly new and hadn't quite earned the footing they thought their brand should have, but that wasn't the terminal answer we wanted to give them. Instead, we wanted to focus on areas they could compete with, while building up the entire site and turning their offline brand into an online brand.
Conversion rates, search metrics, and even PPC data showed a small but consistent win on a niche product that didn't perform nearly as well in the brick-and-mortar stores. It wasn't a target for us or the CEO. Yet online, there was obvious interest. Not only that, with low effort, this series of products was poised to score big in natural search due to low competition. The estimated search volume (per Google Keyword Planner) wasn't extraordinary by any stretch, but it led to traffic that spent considerable dollars on these products. So much so, in fact, that this product became a focus point of the website. Sometimes, mining through rocks can uncover gold (jewelry pun intended).
Conclusion
My biggest hope is that your takeaway after reading this piece is a candid look at your role as an SEO or digital marketer. You’re a person with a “unique set of skills,” being called upon to perform works of brilliance. Being busy does create pressure; that pressure can sometimes force you to look for shortcuts or “phone it in.” If you really want to find the purest joy in what you’ve chosen as a career, I believe it’s from the stories embedded within the data. Go get ’em, Sherlock!
Bill,
Your post shines a bright light on what (a) I love about data and (b) what I typically hate about data as it regards online marketing. Too often we blindly follow the data yielded by GA, preferring to allow it to lead us instead of using it to inform our efforts.
In the end, it's about insight, as you make VERY clear:
Saving this post to Pocket right away.
RS
Thanks for reading, Ronell! See you soon...
To add to that, what tests are required to make your insights statistically conclusive enough to form the basis of a recommendation?
Analytics has been always a challenging job for me. There are so many things which is out of mind for me in Analytics. I use Analytics on daily basis and to be very honest, i always get confused to get proper data regarding visitors on regular basis. But i learned many things about Analytics after reading posts on Moz.
This is really an effective post and very helpful to get more understanding about the features of Analytics. An effective post with very deep research.. thank u soo much @Bill
Truly insightful, helpful and useful information!
I have to admit this rings so true. My first real venture into Analytics was while working on an inhouse project and deep diving into Analytics was one of the most fun things to do.
Used a lot for paid campaigns where we were able to nail the best converting demographics and then using these to run super targeted Facebook ads.
However having shifted to the agency side, it is has increasingly become difficult to keep pace with analytics. There is also a potential grey area - Does Analytics review fall under an SEO company's efforts?
Often the scope of work doesn't allow one to focus on analytics as much as one should.
Yeah, to echo Ronell, I started reading this and then realized this is awesome and need to give this more attention. Adding to pocket immedietly. I might be back to add more comments. This looks awesome!
Thanks guys. I'm glad you found it valuable. I always want to back up my thoughts with examples, so glad they were useful.
Thanks Bill, for this great post. It was very insightful and helpful! Digging into analytic data on a daily basis is very crucial, it should become an essential habit that can help not just evaluate a performance, but find valuable opportunities!
I liked your stories and examples of useful analytic platforms that I haven't had a chance to get familiar with, like RankRager or Cognitive SEO.
Thanks again!
Some really useful resources here thank you. I agree that relying on a "unique stet of skills" is not going to cut it. Especially given how complex SEO is and increasingly so. I must add that logging into analytics is not going to make you a better analyst either, so it's not necessarily key issue.
If anything this is a skills issue being a lack of understanding on how to make decisions with data. Therefore the focus should be on understanding what it is you're trying to improve, what data and statistical tests are required to answer that question. ONLY THEN, can you start thinking about where those sources of data come from which may include Google Analytics.
This was great on so many levels and I would say that making sure you have enough time to view a clients analytics is one of the most important things, and by looking at the survey there are just so many tasks that seem to get in the way.
Also the being active and not reactive is something that when a client calls at 8am because they are looking at their analtyics more than you and then ask why have we had no traffic for a week. Although it may be a small fix you have to explain that instead of catching it right away. (This has happened to me more than once)
The last is digging through GA to find a story, and this can help marketers in so many ways because the facts are normally right there for you to explain to the client and then put effort into making it a good story.
Awesome post thanks for the insight to the good tools.
Thanks for the kind words. I'm really glad you found it useful!
Great article Bill. Personally I find that diving into the data and uncovering hidden stories is one of the funnest parts of the job. What's even better is when you take action on these insights and it works out awesome for the client.
I'd probably say that although it would be ideal to log into these accounts every day, the most important thing would be that you do get enough time to do some analysis frequently. Block out some detective time every so often and make sure you'll have enough time to do enough digging. You can always set up alerts for your important things to monitor every day that way you can still be proactive when something goes south.
Loved the stories too. Story 1 is all too familiar haha.
Thanks for sharing Bill!
This is an excellent post. Story 1: The Forgotten Links was particularly useful to me in an audit I am performing right now. Thanks for the insight.
great. I've always been fond of examples myself :)
Great post, Bill.
An SEO consultant friend of mine recommended giving it a read, and I'm glad he did.
About "analytics telling the right story". I was wondering: how do you approach/deal with ghost visits and blocked trackings that come with the rise of ad blocking and general purpose blocking software such as AdBlock Plus, uBlock, etc. Do you feel you have to include their impact in your process in order to tell a more accurate analytics story?
At our startup Snipcart, we recently had a lot of discussions (even wrote a whole post) regarding the issue and its impact on our metrics. And I'd love to have the opinion of professional SEOs on the topic.
Thanks again for the write-up!
Cheers,
It's good to know that. Thanks for sharing.
Already bookmarked this Analytical post. The well-done job! Highly appreciated.
The only thing that kept me away from Google Analytics before was the immense work you have to do to segment and filter out the spam referrers specially if the client have a website that is old and they never looked at their Google Analytics data before. You have to spend a considerable amount of time to remove those spam data and see the real traffic data.
But after having a few clients I finally have a list of spam referrers that I can segment right away and start delving into their traffic problems.
Thank you for this post! Very insightful. You talk about asking the client specific questions during your investigation. Maybe you have some ideas of which questions to ask, or more important, how to ask certain questions. I agree that getting the client involved is crucial but sometimes digging requires some slyness (and also asking the right people). What are your thoughts on this?
Always ask about their goals. Lead them to tell you what they care about. Clients are always happy to share what they know. But when you position your questions as, "we need to know this to do our jobs better," it's usually a very welcomed conversation. Our investigation starts on day 1 of the new client with a needs analysis questionnaire. Sometimes clients are slow returning this deep dive questionnaire, but we're simply pushy about it. We need this information.
Examples like these:
Thanks Bill! This is helpful. Yeah, I guess it also depends on the client (and personalities) but it's great to get your perspective on this.
Analytics offer a great way to check progress and spot trends. It can give vital feedback as to how efforts made with SEO have been paying off. It can also help spot downward trends before they really get out of hand. It also gives us a great way to start a dialog with a client and give them feedback. These are all great reasons why checking analytics should be a regular habit!
It's Good to know about this. Thanks for sharing
Great post! A lot of very familiar stories as to why we SEO's don't always get the time we would like to use the power of analytics.
I find dashboards with the key metrics are a great way to get a snap shot of certain useful data sets and can save a ton of time. You can import some fairly decent ones from the GA solutions galery depending on your needs, although there is nothing like making your own to get the exact metrics you want in one place.
I would love to use the other tools mentioned too, and think Razvans Cognitive SEO tool is a great bit of kit, it's just always a battle getting access to all the tools you want/need with a very limited budget, that's why GA is a real gold mine even on the free plan.
Great article, Bill! Thank you for sharing your insight.
very nice
I think that Google analitycs have not the exact numbers of our stadistics because there are a lot of tools that tell us different metrics in a comparation with Google. So, what is the most exactly tool?
You have shared such great ideas in your content.
Thanks for the article, Bill!
I must say that I do not have much time during the week to get down to analytics, but I am sure going to find it now, since you have been so resourceful about their advantages.
I was wondering how much time do you spend on average on analysing your data... And do you make a monthly or quarterly chart for Q1, Q2, etc. reports or something?
Thanks for the answer!
Best,
VS
Hi VS. I honestly don't know what my average is but it's really daily, and as long as I can fit into my client's budget while balancing getting other tasks complete. I try hard to bake time into contracts to perform analysis. Clients never say no to that!
I find Page Analytics (Google Chrome Extension) to be a very handy tool when wanting to view the analytics of a webpage very quickly. Otherwise it can be a tedious task to log into Google Analytics to view stats very quickly.
#nycmixing
I should have called that out Ravi. Yes! That's a phoneomenal extension.
Well written and insightful, good job! analytics is awesome, but sadly, its not that insightful for most local businesses that only have a few visitors a day, what advice would you suggest for local businesses to get more insights in whats going on?
GMB Insights is still data, that may be light, but can give you hypotheses to test against. You may not have obvious stories, but you likely have a good starting point - which is also valuable.
Tagging your maps links may be helpful for slicing and dicing in Analytics, which is something we've done.
Hello Bill,
What about the "not set" and "not provided" keywords?
Unfortunately Google Analytics limits us in this way, to have more detailed information on our statistics.
Search Console's "search analytics" helps make up for it. Granted, clicks vs. sessions, but still quite useful!
Finally!! an instruction manual GA this is great, now I begin to see something more than numbers and lines, no more matrix style, even so I have a lot to read in MOZ. Thanks Bill.
Excellent piece for reading. I have tried few deshboard and they amazing. Everything is on one scree apparently.
Thanks for sharing with us this Bill . Surely many has helped us a lot, because analytics is very important.