An SEO company and SEO consultant would constantly require its clients to register with Google Analytics. This is because Google Analytics is a free service from Google that functions to track the traffic that is coming in to the targeted website. You would however discover later on when using Google analytics that it does more than to track traffic, it actually gives you valuable insights in about the behavior of your traffic whenever they visit your website. Many SEO Companies and SEO Consultants however, are not able to maximise the functionalities offered by Google analytics which leads to poor site evaluation of a target website. The following are some of the processes that one can do in order to utilise Google analytics to the fullest.

1. Use the Goal and Event Tracking – Google analytics offers a goal and event tracking which function by displaying the conversions made in your website and the number thereof. Google analytics allows you to define or set the goals and events that you want to be tracked, for example, a goal may be the number of sign ups or purchases made in your website, while events may be the number of times users clicked on the purchase form or the sign-up forms.

2. Focus on Customer Segmentation – if you would like Google to track the traffic according to customer type then it would be best to focus on customer segmentation. This will display the behavior of your traffic and the paths that the client or customer took while visiting your website. Among those that are tracked in customer segmentation are the new visitors and returning visitors.

3. Track Categories – not all pages may be tracked or some web pages might have higher importance on being tracked than others, this is why segmenting your web pages in order to track those that are deemed to be more important is considered as an important feature in Google analytics. This will allow you to compare the traffic coming in, say in page A as compared with page B.

These are just some of the basic features that you can utilise with Google analytics in order for you not only to track your pages’ progress but you would also be given a good insight on how your website fare in terms of conversions for your products. One thing that you should always put into consideration before starting to use Google analytics is to effectively plan what you want Google analytics track in your website.

For many SEO companies and SEO consultants websites must be regularly audited or assessed in order to know the “SEO health” of the websites in their custody. Assessment is important for an SEO company to track the progress of their SEO campaign as well as to determine the effects of the different search engine optimisation strategies. The importance of documenting every SEO strategy implemented and the Assessment of the website in terms of its performance via analytics would give you valuable data on what works and what doesn’t, remember that every search engine algorithm is kept a secret and every algorithm have hundreds if not thousands of ranking factors.

Tracking the site’s performance SEO-wise is not going to be a problem since there are several applications that were developed in order to automate such tracking process. However, in assessing the website, such should be done manually as it will give you an idea on what works or what doesn’t work. The following are some areas that should be the areas that should be assessed in your website.

1. Assess your page links – start assessing if your website still have enough “SEO juice” since links created would have the tendency of becoming broken over time, this could be due to site changes, site closure or simply the webmaster have removed the link to your website. Then move on to assessing your sites internal links, you may have changed or removed a website page that may be linking to your homepage thus a reduction in the number of your links.

2. Assess your Keywords – it is a good time to revisit your keyword research and check whether or not you have already ranked in the “strong keywords”. Remember that traffic is the most important target for SEO thus you should assess if your keywords still would yield a high volume of traffic, if not it would be time to move on to another target keyword.

These may just be two of the site assessment that you can do, however doing this may increase the stability of your website in terms of search engine optimisation.

SEO keyword position monitoring and tracking is one of the most time consuming task for every SEO specialist. As the standard Google Analytics setup is not proving that kind of stats in keywords reports. But, as every Web Analytics specialist may know Google Analytics can be customized using “Custom Variables” funcionality. To start monitoring your keyword positions in Google using Google Analytics reports you have to customize Google Analytics tracking script and add “Custom Variables” on every page of your website.

Please see below the instructions how to record your keyword positions in GA reports:

1. Place the code displayed below on every page somewhere between <head></head> tags.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
function garankings()
{
var url = String(document.referrer);
// confirm they came from G
if (url.indexOf (“google.”) !=-1)
{
var urlVars = {};
var parts = url.replace(/[?&]+([^=&]+)=([^&]*)/gi, function(m,key,value)
{
urlVars[key] = value;
});
// Push to GA Custom Variables
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', '1', 'Rankings', urlVars["cd"], 1]);
}
}
</script>

2. Call javascript function garankings() in a body tag. It should look like: <body onLoad=”garankins();”>

3. To start monitoring your keyword rankings go to your analytics, click on “Visitors -> Custom Variables” and then you’ll be able to see what were teh positions of yoru keywords.

In the early October Google released Google Analytics update which will allow to see Google search data in Google Analytics reports. Google search data is gathered from Google Webmaster account.

To start monitoring Google Webmaster stats in Google Analytics you have to link your Google webmaster account with Google Analytics. To do so, go to the new version of Google Analytics, click  on “My Site” – > Reports -> Traffic Sources -> “Search Engine Optimisation” and the  select “Queries” . Then you will see the window as displayed below:

Click on “Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing” and you will be directed to Google Analytics “Web Property Settings” page where you’ll have to link your analytics with webmaster tools. To link them together you have to click on “edit” as showed below.

Google Analytics search queries report contains three different reports:

• Queries (Number of impressions, Clicks, Average Position, Click Through Rate (CTR))
• Landing pages (Number of impressions, Clicks, Average Position, Click Through Rate (CTR))
• Geographical Summary  (Number of impressions, Clicks,  Click Through Rate (CTR))

In the next few weeks Google is adding the feature of real-time stats in new version of Google Analytics. This feature will help to understand what is  the impact of social media and other sources which are driving traffic to the site. Real-time tracking also will help to make sure that google tracking is correctly installed, before sending visitors to site.

New Teal Time analytics feature will be available under the Dashboard tab. Also only users with full administrator rights will be able to use the feature real time analytics.

Google Analytics is an essential tool that all website owners should at least be aware of, analytics allows you to track a lot of information about your site, it informs you of all the activities that a user carries out, for example, where they directed from and how long they stayed on the site.

How to Create a Google Analytics Account

To create a Google Analytics account, you will need a Google account this doesn’t mean you need to create a Gmail account, simply go to http://www.google.co.uk and on the top right hand side of the screen you will see a sign in button.

After you have clicked on the sign in button you will be taken to a page that looks like this:

Once you have clicked the Create Account Button, you will be sent to a details page, fill out your details that you would like to use, remember creating a Google account and using analytics is completely free. I suggest that you use the same email address and other details that you use for the business or webpage that you are setting up your analytics for, however if you have multiple business’ then you could use any email address or create multiple Google accounts.

After you have filled out the form, it will send you to a page that confirms your account creation. You then need to go back to Google’s home page and again go to the sign in button. Your account should already be in the username section so just add your password and you should then be sent to a page like this:

Click on the verify button then go to your inbox and look for a message from “account-verification-noreply@google.com”. In the email you receive it will say “Welcome to Google Accounts. To activate your account and verify your email address, please click the following link:” if you click the link directly below it will take you to a page that looks similar to this:

So now you have your Google account all set up, we must move to setting up the analytics account.

How to Create Your Analytics Account

Visit the Analytics site: http://www.google.com/analytics/ and click the sign up button which is located on the left hand side:

You will then be taken to a login page, just enter your email address and password for the Google account you just created, then you will be directed to a sign up page, just click the sign up button on the bottom left hand side. Once you have been directed again, you are shown a form for your analytics account, it is essential that you enter all information correctly as any mistakes will affect your analytics results and may even cause it not to work.

You will then have to enter your full name and agree to Google’s Terms and Conditions, after you have done that you will be directed to a page showing the tracking code for your analytics, but the way I will show you how to add analytics to you site, you will not need this code. You will need another code. So click onto the save and finish button.

Adding Analytics to Your Site

Log onto your Content Management System, yours could be a WordPress, Joomla or Create however there are many more. Once logged in look for a an edit site information tab, once on here look for Google analytics and add the UA code, If your CMS does not have this, then there will be a plug in available, make sure to check ratings and so on to see if the plug in is functional and users are satisfied with the plug in. Install your chosen plug in into your CMS, follow the instructions and add your UA number to the plug in.

Checking Your Analytics

Google Analytics should take no longer than 72 hours to register, but the majority of the time it is done quicker, to check your analytics, simply visit: the analytics home page, the account overview page will show very brief information, but clicking the report button will show you much more in-depth information.

As you might notice with a new version of Google Analytics, Google has implemented “Social Plugin”, which enables you to track and monitor Google +1 likes and Twitter tweets on your site.

Google Analytics Social Plugin

If you have already added Google +1 to your website it will automatically integrate with you Google Analytics account. But in some cases, Google Analytics social plugin tracking does not work properly and it is not showing any social activity data in your Google Analytics profile. If that’s the case you have to follow these steps:

1. If you are using async javascript snippet then you have to call _trackSocial method using “_gaq.push([‘_trackSocial’, Googleplus, Like]);”

If you using old version snippet, then you can rename it  “_trackSocial” method using

var pageTracker = _gat._createTracker(‘UA-xxxxx-y’);

pageTracker._trackSocial(Googleplus, Like);

2. To send the social plugin action to Google Analytics you  have to call _trackSocial method on the social plugin action.

Twitter and Facebook, have slightly different integration. Which can be found here

Sometimes you may meet a problem that the website hasn’t separate ”Thank You” page, which is necessary for Goal Tracking as “Goal URL”. But there is a solution for this issue:

1. Add _trackPageview javascript method in a link which is clicked after the inquiry form is filled. Follow the example below:

<a href=”http://www.seo-positive.co.uk/Contact-us” onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/contact-us/thank-you’);”>Submit</a>

The code above tricks Google Analytics thinking that http://www.seo-positive.co.uk/contact-us/thank-you page was clicked and Google Analytics tracking code was executed, but this page doesn’t physical exist.

2. After _trackpageview javascript code is implemented, you have to create a Goal and set “Goal URL” as  /contact-us/thank-you

3. You may be able to track your Goals without having separate thank you page.

Sometimes you may need to report traffic to a different subdomains only. I’ll try to take a real situation and explain how to create profiles and filters properly.

seo-positive.co.uk has different subdomains like news.seopositive.co.uk, tutorials.seopositive.co.uk and main site www.seo-positive.co.uk and there is a need to monitor traffic separately for these subdomains only. Before making any changes for the main seopositive.co.uk Google Analytics profile I will create backup profile without any filters.

Then I will create two seperate Google Analytics profiles for tutorials.seopositive.co.uk and news.seopositive.co.uk subdomains. Also I have to add Google Analytics Snippet on every tutorials and news subdomain pages. Google Analytics Snippet will be a little different than usual and will look like:

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxx-x']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.seopositive.co.uk']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

After creating new Google Analytics profiles and adding analytics snippets you may need to create filters for every subdomain you want to track.

1. I will create a filter for tutorials.seopositive.co.uk which will include traffic only from tutorials.seopositive.co.uk subdomain.

2. Then I will create two additional filters for the main analytics profile www.seo-positive.co.uk which will exclude traffic from tutorials.seopositive.co.uk and news.seopositive.co.uk subdomains.

1. Exclude visitors from your IP address. Use  http://www.whatismyip.com/ to get your IP address

2. Setup goals to measure your performance.

3. Setup your own Search Tracking

4. Implement eCommerce tracking if you are running eCommerce website

5.  Select right Time Zone

6. Properly Link your Google Analytics with your Adwords Account.