What Website Metrics to Track in Google Analytics?

Importance of Using Google Analytics to Track SEO Effectiveness

The importance of tracking your traffic from organic search, or SEO traffic is critical to measuring the success of your content in search ranking. Are you reaching the right audience? Are your readers finding the content through search engines? Do they stay on the site for long or read more than one article? Having website analytics metrics defined will help you answer these and other common traffic tracking questions.

How to Set Up Your Analytics Tracking Report

When on the Google Analytics dashboard, you will need to set the date for a given period of time. The tool makes it easy to set this period to a month, or a day. For this report, typically setting the date to the month prior is the recommendation.

Q: How to Set the Date in Google Analytics? A: Set the Date by Clicking Month Name

Once you set up the date parameters, you can also customize the segments. Analytic segments break up the data in useful ways, which is preset by Google. The segments can be added to any date range data set, and applied to most dashboard metrics being monitored, from social metrics to total traffic. Here is a snapshot of how segments look, and where to find them in the dashbaoard.

Q: How do I add custom segments in Google Analytics? A: Use the arrow on any of the segment dashboards. The arrow offers a drop down to multiple segments that are preset.

The navigation is on the right rail of the dashboard, and is set up to allow a site owner to drill down and get insights into a variety of data segments. Below is a recap of the most important segments for those starting out.

Common Website Search Metrics to Track

Do you know what analytics metrics to track to know how your site ranks in search engines? Well, it is going to vary depending on the business you are in, but there is a set of solid foundational metrics to always track when looking at organic search traffic and determining the success of your content. Here are the top 5 acquisition metrics to track:

1)    Monthly traffic total & organic total (a segmented filter you must add manually)

2)    URLs (or landing pages) receiving traffic from search

3)    Average bounce rate

4)    Average pageviews

5)    If you are an e-commerce site you will want to measure product conversions/ sign ups

Q: How to Find Search Engine Referrals to my Website? A: Look At “Organic Referrals” listed Under Acquisition segment.

How to Track Organic Search Traffic from Keywords

Stop asking “How can I track traffic for my top keywords?” because sadly, it is no longer possible. TO date Google no longer allows site owners to see keyword data, and buckets all traffic into a “not provided” category. This will soon be Yahoo’s plan as well. Since it is not going to be possible to track organic keyword traffic, it is still important to track other metrics for SEO performance. Here are the top search metrics to track, other than search traffic referred by keywords, using Google Analytics:

1)    Landing pages – you can see which landing pages are receiving keyword traffic (just not the keyword)

2)    Location – you can drill down by the user location to see where content performance is being search during a given period (this is best for local businesses)

3)    Total organic traffic – this can be a segment defined under the Acquisition tab, presented above)

Q: How do I measure search engine traffic in Google Analytics? A: Drilling down under the “Search Engine Optimization” segment, a user can easily look at Queries, and landing page referrals from search engines.

Ways to Track Social Media Engagement
The set up of Google Analytics is much easier than some other larger scale analytics tracking tools, and there are many new features allowing you to drill down into social media engagement and referrals. These social platforms add tremendous value to the authority of your website, further improving the search ranking. Using Google Analytics, it is also important to monitor referral traffic these verticals. If you are looking for how to measure social media traffic to your website, here are the top social media metrics you should monitor:

1)    Social Network Referrals – the sites sending traffic that period

2)    Landing pages – this will show you the pages people commonly traffic that period

3)    Conversions – for e-commerce sites or those with a thank you page or sign-up lead form, this feature is a value to tracking many social platform campaigns.

Q: What social media platforms can I track traffic using Google Analytics? A: Using the traffic segment for Social, Google Analytics easily allows for users to track traffic from all social platforms.

In my Skillshare course I offer formal training on how to use your Google Analytics, as well as a customized template that you can download for free and use to track your website traffic every month. Here is the link to the Skillshare course for access to this and other great analytics tools for SEO