5 Tips for Better Organic Traffic Analysis

Posted on Sep 11th 2014 in Search Engine Marketing

Google Analytics is one of the best tools out there for getting to grips with your website metrics, but if you haven’t set it up correctly, all you’ll achieve is inaccurate data and incorrect conclusions about how your organic traffic converts.

Here are 5 suggestions of how to make better use of the platform so you can gain more useful insights into your site’s organic traffic and fine tune your SEO strategy for even better results.

1. Set Goals

A lot of the time, we get caught up in rankings above all else when it comes to SEO. But, what we really need to know as marketers is: does our search engine traffic lead to email list subscriptions, engagement and bookings? Setting up goals in Google Analytics will help you start to measure these things, and more.

Goals can be used to track just about any objectives you have for your site, from visit durations, to video plays, ad clicks and more. There are 20 different goals you can use, so take advantage of them, and find out if your organic traffic is really performing for you.

To find out more about goals, click here.

2. Use Bot Filtering

Not all of your website’s traffic is made up of guests and potential guests; some of it comes from bots and search engine spiders that crawl the web gathering data and indexing pages.

Thanks to a relatively new addition to Google Analytics, you can now isolate this bot activity from the traffic that actually has the potential to drive bookings, so you can gain a more accurate understanding of how your guests are converting on your site.

To set up bot filtering, go to “Property Settings” in the Property level.

3. Use Annotations To Record Changes

Using annotations to keep a record of changes that impact your site can be a great help when it comes to reviewing and analysing site traffic. For example, if Google launches another algorithm update, setting an annotation to mark the date will help you identify the impact the change may have on your organic traffic in the weeks immediately afterwards.

You’ll find Annotations in the Admin area at the View level.

4. Use Custom Dimensions To Segment Traffic

Perhaps one of its most useful tools, custom dimensions allows you to segment organic traffic into categories by bringing in demographic information and other data you may have access to outside Google Analytics.

To find out more, click here.

5. Enable Demographics, In-Market & Affinity Segments

Reaching a target audience through SEO can be tricky, but by activating demographics, in-market and affinity segments in Analytics, you can gain a better insight into how far your efforts are successful. The kind of data provided here includes information about age and gender, as well as broad groups of users based around a shared interest, such as ‘Sports enthusiasts”.

You need a piece of additional code to make full use of these demographic metrics. To get started, click here.

Do you make use of these tools to analyse your resort’s organic traffic and prioritise your SEO strategies? Let us know in the comments below!