The content on your website plays a key role in the success of leading and capturing user hits. Knowing the details and logistics as to how people are finding your site, what they’re focusing on and how long they look allows you to have total control of the overall marketing strategy. Most importantly, this will help you see what content is working and what is not.
Using Google Analytics paired with other innovative SEO techniques, Harger Howe can supply you with results that can be sized-up and revised indefinitely that will keep your website or microsite fresh, popular and user-friendly.
A SEO report can prove to be a very useful tool in your internet marketing endeavors and we invite you to download a free PDF sample of such a report to see how you can benefit. Simply fill out the form out this page and you’ll be well on your way to success!
Now if you are looking at an Analytics Report, you may be wondering, “Okay! How the heck do I read this?” There is a lot of in-depth information in there, all very useful. This article will focus on each main piece and what it measures.
Sessions:
The most basic definition of a session is one visit to a website, which includes all the pages that are viewed in the visit. For example, if a user comes to your site and goes through a few pages over the span of a few minutes and then closes their browser or travels to another site, that counts as a session. Sessions are correlated to the IP address owned by the user as they travel through the site.
Pages:
This section is an overview of all of the pages on your site within a specified date range. This list is shown in descending order from the highest ranking pages to the lowest. One thing that right off the bat is beneficial to making your pages easily searchable is to give them simple and concise names that are at the same time unique. You can request metrics outlining the performance of the site as a whole or even single pages to narrow things down.
All of this data is broken down on each page into categories that give you a full scope of how people are interacting with your site:
- Pageviews: A single viewing of a page on your site. Any time the page is loaded in a user’s browser, this number grows.
- Unique Pageviews: This element eliminates multiple views of the same page within a single session. Viewing the same page in a session will only count as one page view. This de-clutters the data a bit when comparing it to standard pageviews.
- Average Time on Page: Shows the amount of time on average that users are staying on the page.
- Entrances: This number shows the number of times people are “entering” a session, defining said page as the first page seen within that session.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of entrances on this page where the user did not move forward from within that page.
- Percent Exit: This shows a percentage of total pageviews that are defined as the last page seen within a session.
- Page Value: This component works in correlation with goals. You can set up goals you want to reach in terms of traffic on your site and this calculates the total value of your goal divided by the number of pageviews.
All of this data an be broken down and compared side by side in a number of ways that lead to systematic and smart game plans for your SEO campaign.
Navigation Summary:
This is a very useful report that shows the users’ journey through your site, displaying pages that users are on before and after the page being analyzed. This is useful because it can help explain how and why a user got from point A to point B on your site. For instance, they may be applying for a career on page A, and with a Navigation Summary you can see how many actually got to the “Thank You” page that is displayed after filling out an application form. Any page can be analyzed, and pages before and after are shown as “previous page path” and “next page path” respectively.
In-Page Reports:
This visual report shows you what links are being clicked on a page and helps you understand how your content is being interacted with. This can measure how your calls to action, banner ads, navigation and other pieces of your page are performing. This is also a great resource that shows how far people are scrolling down your pages and if you should re-approach how your content is laid out, especially in different browser views such as on phones or tablets.
Landing Pages:
Analyzing your landing pages is key for determining what to revolve around in your marketing campaign. When you know what pages are getting the most visits, you can constantly be reassessing your marketing style per campaign as you will have a complete understanding of which pages are doing well under the arsenal of marketing methods and services that Harger Howe can provide. A big factor to understanding your landing pages’ performance is through conversion rates. Many pages are viewed throughout a user or potential applicant’s journey before a conversion is made, but only one landing page. We’ll help you find the sweet spot between different marketing strategies and your customized landing pages that will greatly increase your conversion rate and ROI.
How Harger Howe Can Help:
There is a lot more data that we can delve into, such as what types of devices your sites are being accessed by, and the geological location of each session. If you would like more information as to how we can help you take charge of your web presence with a monitored microsite, please contact us. We’ll give you results that can be measured!
Need some inspiration? Check out these "How-To" examples from the Harger Howe blog:
