Recently the folks at Google Analytics rolled out some new features in the form of Advanced Segmentation and Custom Reporting. It is still in beta and being released to accounts over the last few weeks; yours truly just got access last week – so let's look at some potential metrics and reporting that we can do in line with our SEO programs.

Three of the main areas we look at are

Search traffic – how much traffic are search engines sending, growth rates and conversions Keywords – which terms are bringing the most traffic and affecting conversions Content performance – which content items are performing the best and search traffic growth.

Today we'll look at 'Search traffic' and how we can use Google Analytics to dig better understand the efficacy of your SEO program.

Search traffic analytics

Many times in the SMB world we'll have limited engine targeting, as far as targeting Google more so than say Live. Because of limited budgets, many small business owners simply can't afford to be chasing the engines with smaller traffic share. Looking at over-all search traffic growth is a simple, but effective metric. So fire up GA and go to;

'Traffic Sources > Search Engines'

One of the simplest views is month over month,

This will give you some ongoing data as to the progress of your campaigns. As important as search traffic growth is, be sure to ALWAYS investigate the conversions (goals) tab as well. Here's what our 'Goal Conversions' info looks like,

And don't be cheeky – as noted we were consciously moving more peeps to our primary conversion... so it's doing what we want. As far as traffic growth, Google is the main target in this campaign and has been steadily improving 15-25% month over month and conversions are growing as well... happy times... back to the metrics;

Digging deeper

So that's the basics, let's say we want to look into the actual visitor engagement this month? Understanding the engagement levels from search engine traffic will help give an over-all view of how well things are going.

For that we can make a few advanced segments to; the first we're looking at is page depth. Generally speaking, (varies by site type) we want to try and engage users to at least 3 pages as these tend to be the strongest visitor segment and have higher conversion rates.

So, the first advanced segment we'll make is for visitors that have gone deeper than 3 pages on the site like so; Now when you go back to the; 'Traffic > Search Engines' report, go up to the top right and select where it says 'Advanced Segments'. In the drop-down select, from our custom ones, the new segment we just created (whatever name U gave it).

As you can see, I have been creating a wide variety of them for different purposes.... More on the others in time. For now let's look at this month's search traffic with an eye to those super-visitors that went at least 3 pages into the website; our report now looks like this;

What does this tell us? For starters just under 9% more Yahoo visitors are digging deeper and generally seem more engaged. We also note that the average Googler visit are of a shorter span, new visitors and most likely to bounce. Anecdotally our Live traffic is the most active as far as 'repeat' visitors, be that what it may. Ultimately we cannot discount the Google traffic as its sheer mass still makes it the target of choice.

But let's talk turkey... Show me the money – or conversions at least. Is the increased engagement making a rat's ass of a difference? Click our 'Goal Conversion' tab;

What is great about using this simple engagement segmentation is that we can see how effectively we're engaging traffic from search engines and converting it as well. From here we can dig into the actual keyword data for cross supporting data which can establish the over-all efficacy of the program. That is to say, we also want to look at which keywords/phrases are driving conversions and which aren't. More on that later.

DIY Reporting – Creating custom reports

Now, one thing that you may come across is when the reports just don't offer up all the metrics you're interested in. So let's try a few new angles on our search traffic report that can also be helpful. Let's have a look at some engagement data and conversion data wrapped into a traffic report. We want to go to the custom reports interface and create a new report.

Visit http://www.netultimate.com for articles on how to improve the conversion rate for your website.