Metrics that Matter - Conversion Rate

Posted by eellsworth on 16th Aug 2014

Are your SEO metrics relevant and useful?

One of your duties as a SEO is provide meaningful KPIs (key performance indicators) for your clients.  And when I say meaningful I mean something that:

  • Reveals an underlying insight to their business; and
  • Provides information that can help affect positive change

Google Analytics are great for statistics but unless you take the next step and put actual value behind those numbers, you’re only hurting the client.

For example, let’s examine conversion rate.  Without any effort on your part, you can easily log into Google Analytics and see the historical conversion rate of the site:

[caption id="attachment_129" align="alignnone" width="562" caption="Google Analytics - Conversion Rate"]Google Analytics - Conversion Rate[/caption]

Is this revealing any insight to you?  No it doesn’t.  What action can you take based on a 0.16% conversion rate?  None, actually.  You need to put some context around it.  It’s simple and will quite revealing.

Using the Advanced Segments dropdown, select Paid Traffic and Non-Paid Traffic to reveal the following graph and data:

[caption id="attachment_135" align="alignnone" width="562" caption="Conversion Rate: Organic Traffic vs. Paid Traffic"]Conversion Rate: Organic Traffic vs. Paid Traffic[/caption]

Now within a few minutes you’ve discovered something about your online store.  Your organic traffic is producing conversions 150% better than your non-paid traffic!  From a SEO or business perspective you can now take any of the following actions:

  • Further research your organic traffic to help increase website traffic for those converting keywords and phrases; or
  • Investigate your PPC campaigns and ads to diagnose if you may have a landing page problem; or
  • Double your organic SEO efforts; or
  • etc.

Maybe your paid traffic visitors are purely window shoppers while your non-paid traffic visitors are buyers…but without a bit of investigation you’ll never know.

Again, if we segment the traffic into search traffic vs. referral traffic we see:

[caption id="attachment_136" align="alignnone" width="562" caption="Conversion Rate: Referral vs. Search Network"]Conversion Rate: Referral vs. Search Network[/caption]

Revealing and useful, right?  Perhaps we should investigate our referral network and increase our advertising footprint on those key websites.

Remember to always take an extra step when analyzing website data…until you do, you’ll be missing a lot of what your visitors are trying to tell you.

!