ISEdb.COM

I admit it. I’m a Google Analytics
junkie. I try to stay away, but every now and then I hear it calling my
name and I break down and log in. I feel the familiar rush of
excitement running through my veins almost instantly. And I know
anything else I may have planned to do that day won’t get done because
I’ll be in my own world for hours. My analytics world. Just me and my
stats. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh…

Sad, huh? Well, not really. I get a ton of
great information out of Google Analytics that can later be put to good
use in many ways for my business. For instance, I’ve been writing
monthly columns for Search Engine Land
and TalentZoo for quite some time now, and it gets tedious. It’s not
easy thinking of topics to write about that not only fit the target
audience of each publication but that haven’t already been written to
death. Being the lazy toad that I am, I sometimes just don’t want to do
them. When that happens, I wonder if it’s really worth it and ask
myself what exactly I get out of writing these columns? And being the
good sport that “myself” is, it answers me back with “I don’t know, why
don’t you consult your precious Google Analytics?”

So that’s what I do.

I
use Google Analytics all the time to see what keywords people are
finding our clients’ websites with, and I do the same for our own
website. But I don’t always think to use it for other information, like
looking at where else (besides the search engines) traffic is coming
from. After all, online marketing isn’t just about search engine
traffic. (Heresy, I know!)

It’s a bit tricky to get information
regarding articles that are not on our own High Rankings website.
Ideally, it would be great if we had access to the other sites’
analytics to know how many reads the articles are actually getting, but
alas, we don’t. Thankfully, the columns I write do have bio links back
to our website, and many of them have links to other articles that are
published on our site. So what I need to look at in Google Analytics is
the traffic that comes from the sites where my columns are posted.

Digging In

To
do this in Google Analytics, I simply click “Traffic Sources,” then
“Referring Sites,” and then either browse through the listings until I
see the domain I’m looking for or scroll to the bottom of the page
until I see a search box. It says “Find Source” and has a drop-down
menu with “containing” or “excluding.” In the search box, I type
“talentzoo” and click “Go.” This takes me straight to the page with
information about referrals to our website from my TalentZoo articles.
I can see how many people visited from TZ, how many average pages they
looked at per visit, the average time they spent on our website, what
percentage of them were new visitors as opposed to returning visitors,
and I can see the bounce rate – i.e., what percentage came to only one
page and then left.

It’s pretty cool info.

And sure
enough, there were a number of visitors from both TalentZoo and Search
Engine Land! Not millions, by any means, but hundreds. Certainly enough
to at least keep me writing each month. One of our marketing goals at
High Rankings is to continuously try to get the word out about our free
SEO information and resources, as well as our SEO services, products
and SEO classes to people who have never heard of us. Along those
lines, Google Analytics showed me that approximately 75% of the people
who click through to our site from my columns are new visitors.

Not
only that, but some of them convert into newsletter subscribers. We had
a 5% conversion rate from SEL and a 1.5% conversion rate from TZ.
Again, it’s not huge, but we’ve already figured out that newsletter
subscribers are our most valuable asset in terms of long-term
conversions – that is, they eventually sign up for a class or some SEO
consulting.

While I was reviewing this info, I had a look at some of our other referrers. I had a number of them from Sphinn, where I’ve had newsletter articles posted, as well as a bunch from SEOmoz, Search Engine Guide and Search Engine Roundtable. One of the largest groups of visitors came from StumbleUpon.
While I don’t “stumble” very often, now and then a newsletter reader
will submit an Advisor article to them. Very often, these stumbles take
off and we can end up with 1,000 visitors over the course of a couple
of days. Unfortunately, while they are generally new visitors (more
than 97%), stumblers are the worst converting visitors out there. They
provide exactly ZERO conversions! Not a newsletter sign-up, not a forum
registration, nothing.

But What About Links?

Interestingly enough, soon after I had gathered all this cool info from Google Analytics, I had just happened to come across an interview with social media exert Brent Csutoras
that was talking about social media sites such as StumbleUpon, which
said that it’s not the conversions that are important, but the
resulting links you get.  So I fired up my Google Webmaster Tools and
checked out the links received from one of my articles that had a lot
of StumbleUpon traffic. It was the Linkbait-gate one.

At first glance, it looked good. Webmaster Tools
said I had 154 links – nice! But on further investigation I found that
most of those were just spam links from just a couple of sites. There
were a few from some from Sphinn user profile pages as well. In terms
of real links, there was only a handful. (I don’t go soliciting links,
and perhaps I’d get more if I did, so keep that in mind.) But the moral
to this part of the story is that I will continue to measure the
success of my articles by conversions, not links – although I do see
the value in looking at both.

Back to Search Engine Traffic

After
reviewing our referral numbers, I was curious how they compared with
our search engine traffic. About 60% of the traffic to High Rankings
comes from search engines, with most of that (51%) coming from Google.
Referring sites make up close to 17% and direct traffic is just over
24%. The greatest amount of search engine traffic goes to a few of my
most popular articles on our site. And a large chunk of search engine
traffic lands on various High Rankings forum threads. Overall, when
taken as a whole, search engine traffic doesn’t have a very high
conversion rate. However, not all search engine traffic is created
equal. While traffic leading to my articles may not convert very well,
traffic coming from people at Google looking specifically for SEO
services or SEO training does indeed convert. But this is an article
for another time!