Web Analytics

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Everyone wants more web traffic! The place to start mining for traffic data is right in your own backyard: your free Google Analytics application (www.google.com/analytics/). You can use these techniques with all analytics packages, but we'll lead you through the exact Google Analytics reports.

1. Find out what keywords customers are using now. If you go to Traffic > Keywords and select "unpaid" in the tiny blue link right below the graph, you can learn how your customers speak (and search.) This will give you insight into themes that you have neglected to optimize for or themes you should consider for paid search.
2. Find out on what keywords customers find you in the lesser search engines. Go to Traffic > Search Engines. At the bottom of the page on the left side is a little search box. Type in Google and change the drop-down box on the left from Containing to Excluding. This will give you all the search engines that aren't the Big Guy, and then, using the segmentation box at the top of the page, segment by keyword. Now you can decide if you want to buy these keywords that you are getting picked up on in the lesser search engines, or optimize for them in Google -- if you don't have them already.
3. Create a report of your internal search engine keywords, that is the site search feature of your own site. To do this, start by creating a search yourself, hit the enter button, and then look at the address bar for your site. If the URL for your website search program says, http://www.mysite.com?query={YourSearchStringHere}, then you know to look for the word query. Or, maybe you'll learn that it looks like http://www.mysite.com?search={YourSearchStringHere}. In that case, you are looking for the word search. Go to Content>Top Content, scroll down to the little search box at the bottom of the page, and type in the one that works for your site -- query, or search or whatever your internal search engine uses. Expand this report to a list of 500 and use the export functionality at the top left of the page to export into Excel (.CSV). Now you'll have a list of all your internal search terms – consider these terms when doing your SEO and SEM.
4. Figure out what kind of e-mail marketing is succeeding. To do that, start by coding the links in your e-mail. You can put code into just about any e-mail program you are using, including cost-effective e-mail marketers such as ConstantContact. A good place to build the code for your e-mail links is at the ROI Revolution site (http://www.roirevolution.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-url-builder.htm) where they have a great URL Link Builder. Once your e-mail is coded, you can go to Traffic > All Traffic > Medium and choose your e-mail medium. (I always use the word email but you can use whatever you like when you code your URLs.) Select the Conversion Rate tab and then use the segmentation box dropdown menu to learn which e-mails (choose Campaign), which e-mail links (choose Content), or which geographical areas (choose Country/Region/city) are creating more business for you. Build on success, delete failure.
5. Determine your most important referring sites. Referring sites are supposed to be those who give you a link without paying (and sometimes without asking). However, you may also find paid links here (go to Traffic > Referring Sites), such as Shopzilla and other affiliate marketing. Choose the Conversion tab to learn not just where the traffic comes from, but what succeeds. Should you be putting more money into some of those sources and less into others? Lots of those links won't be paid, either -- plenty of them will have the word "mail" in them -- that's when you know you have to code your email! (see step 4.)

These five basic approaches give you an idea of how you can mine the data in Google Analytics to increase traffic to your site.

Robbin Steif is CEO of LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant. She is also on the Board of Directors for the Web Analytics Association.