most frequent mistakes in web analytics : don't trust your analytics

DON’T TRUST YOUR ANALYTICS

Even though … it’s your Best Friend

Who am I?

• Since 2000 : freelance webmaster, researcher, teacher…

• 2006 – 2009: Google Search Quality and Google Analytics teams (Dublin, Ireland)

• Since 2009: SEO in France. Founder of the SEO Agency Woptimo

• 2011 : Co-founder of Search Quality Alliance

Agenda

1.Data gathering and accuracy

2.Keywords

3.Beyond your website

A LITTLE ANECDOTE

Zero Bounce Rate !!

Bounce rate below 10% is almost impossible

The blogger had the GA code 2 times in the source …

DATA GATHERING AND ACCURACY1. Data collection

2. Visits, PageViews, Unique Visitors : what’s the best choice?

3. Returning visitors

4. Too much traffic?

5. GWT and GA

6. Negative Analytics & Stupidity

What tool do you use?

Is your tool server-side or client-side?

Number of hits ≠ Number of visits

Each tool has its own definition of visits, PageViews, Bounce rate…

Accuracy

Or just use 2 Web Analytics tools

Is your tool accurate?

Check your data with several sources Actual sale vs Analytics Number of PageViews vs ads impression Adwords data vs Analytics data

What metric to chose?

It depends on what you want to achieve !

What do you want to do ?

Check notoriety and engagement Unique Visitors and Returning Visitors

Impress your boss / ads publisher

PageViews (or even go for server hits!)

Daily check Number of visits segmented per source of traffic

Ghost visitors …

Have you ever noticed- Visits from an Adwords campaign you stopped ages ago ?- Huge number of visits for a very long tail keywords?

Master your source attribution

To avoid this, segment only New Visitors from Organic

If a visitor comes to your site from a defined source of traffic (Google organic, Google Adwords, referring sites…)

Next times he’ll visit entering urls or via bookmarks It won’t count as direct traffic but GA will use the original source !

A keywords entered one time in Google can lead to hundreds of visits by the same browser !

Visit’s duration

Your organic landing pages can be a page that is not even indexed !! (Link)

A new visit is counted every time you leave the site for 30 minutes or more and come back to it

Let’s say you have a Flash game site that do not need to refresh between 2 games…

Every time a user visits another page ater playing games (to save his score for example), a new visit will be recorded.

Negative Analytics and Stupidity

Evil competitors can use your tracking code on other websites, or just send http request with our GA code …

Stupid webmasters can also make a copy-paste mistakes…

Evil Black-Hat technique

Work-around

Check hostname in your report

Create a filter including only your hostname

Too much traffic?

If you have more than 10K visits a day, your GA will get really slower and advanced segments won’t be accurate.

Do not rely on number of visits for big websites’ segments. Only check big pictures

Work around

Create several profiles using include filters

Check you data on a smallest time range

Webmaster Tools

On GA don’t confuse Webmaster Tools report and GA reports !

RECHECK YOUR KEYWORDS• Broad , Exact, Phrase?• Adwords vs SEO• Adwords reports• Ranking• Keywords and « not provided »• Universal Search

Keywords Search Volume

Use broad for very specific keywords Use phrase for expression and compare with exact it gives you an idea

of the long tail potential of this expressionUse Exact for most keywords but keep in mind that 0 does not mean this

keyword is totally useless.

Adwords and SEO

If you don’t properly tag your campaign or link Adwords to GA : your Adwords keywords will show up in organic search !

Check your current data and your past dataCheck if you have several Adwords accounts. You can now link several

Adwords to 1 GA account.

Adwords Keywords

Matched Search Query may be one of the most efficient report for Adwords.

Check keywords actually searched, and not just the keyword you targeted

≠

Keywords ranking

Ranking in which city?Universal ranking or web ranking?Who’s ranking before you? Is there any Adwords?

Keywords ranking

Good tips on what happens in Google SERP but should not be your SEO main objective.

However, ….

Not provided : a threat for good SEO

Up to 50% SEO visits impacted It’s a Google Search policy, not a GA : all tools are impactedOnly way to work around is checking landing pages and … check the

ranking

Universal Search in GA

Everything is merged into one keyword report. Whether you come from Images, Maps, News, Shopping …

Filters can be used for news.gg / shopping.ggNo filters possible for integrated universal search (except for images)Universal search merged in Webmaster Tools too…

BEYOND YOUR WEBSITE1. Referral

2. Number of backlinks

3. PageRank

4. Alexa and alii

Referral on GA

You don’t have parameters of the referral url ! Can be very annoyingWork around with a filter « exact referral »

PageRank

Toolbar PageRank is not the actual PageRankNo frequent updateNot inline with ranking or link quality

Number of backlinks

Number of backlinks is quite uselessNumber of domain is a little more cleverQuick change can be due to tools update rather than actual changesTry to measure backlinks quality rather than focusing on quantity

Beware of Alexa and tools like that

Some interesting data for big websites, but don’t rely on it too much if you have less than 500K visits a month

Don’t install Alexa toolbar on your computer !!!

If we still have more time

Other common mistakes

• GA code only on some pages• No tracking in your e-mail• Your office IP not excluded• Your GA code twice• Goal configuration

• « useless » Goals• Goals counted twice

MERCI

@smonnier

Référencement Naturel Ergonomie WebAnalytics

Audit Intervention Formation

Ressources :

woptimo.com

sebastien@woptimo.com

@woptimo