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Google Analytics - A Powerful Tool to Monitor Website Traffic

Google Analytics - A Powerful Tool to Monitor Website Traffic

Credit: Google.com

Perry Bernard

24 March 2016, 8:20PM

Perry Bernard

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Analytics is a piece of reporting software that is installed into your website. When a visitor arrives at your website, the software signals Google HQ (or wherever the data collection system for your Analytics account is stored) to say “here’s a visitor – we’ll update you with what this visitor does while here”, and obediently this software monitors the visitor’s every move on your site. For some visits, a visitor leaves soon after arriving. During other visits, a visitor navigates through a few of your pages, and then leaves. If your website has eCommerce, and Analytics is correctly configured to track eCommerce transactions, you may also get a report from Analytics as to what they bought, and how much it cost. Analytics is also fab at telling us how a visitor got to your site in the first place, because when a new visitor comes to the site a digital ‘handover’ occurs that tells Analytics some information on where the visitors came from. That also implies that if you sold something on your website you can attribute that sale to a particular source, entry point or type of visitor. Great information for making decisions about whether the business mechanics of your website is actually working.

None of this information tells us anything about how well your website ranked, or which page of search results the visitor found your website link on. Those are SEO features happening on Google’s website, and that information is not accessible by Analytics.

In days past, it was possible to connect a search keyword to a particular visitor. That meant you could see the result of your SEO work directly in Analytics and be able to tell if your website got business from organic search. For the last little while, Google has stopped sharing that information between their search and Analytics systems, so we now rely on some super sleuthing work to connect cause and effect. Did a particular search phrase in Google search result in a sale on your website? We don’t know for sure. Analytics can show the final result, but not connect that result with the exact cause. So now, we do SEO work, based on some fairly solid research outside of Analytics, and hope that it results in increased visitor rates and more conversions on your website. We can measure the cause through Google Search Console. We can measure the result through Google Analytics. We can’t absolutely prove the connection between the two.

So the boundary of where Search Engine Optimisation ends (at the entry to your website) is where Conversion Rate Optimisation starts.

Read the full guide here: https://crankedseo.com/google-analytics/