Using Analytics software such as Google Analytics can provide great insights into the behaviour of the traffic visiting your website. For a beginner, the wealth of information is often quite overwhelming and many people venture beyond the dashboard and basic reports. In this post, I’m going to explain a few filters you can apply in Google Analytics to gain some really useful information on traffic patterns, and also to track any SEO work you may be doing.

What pages are sending visits from Google

It’s one thing to be tracking the amount of pages Google are indexing, and yes this is very important, but I find it equally important to know which pages are actually attracting clicks from Google. This gives you a very real view of how hard sections of your website are working for you. Armed with that information you can then make improvements as needed.

How to do this:

From the dashboard click ‘content’ followed by ‘top landing pages’…

Add in a new field with ‘source’ as the metric…

Scroll down and click ‘advanced filter; select ‘source’ as the condition and edit the filter to contain ‘google’…

Click ‘apply filter’ and you’ll end up with a nice list of pages sending you traffic from Google. You can then export the list into Excel for further digging.

What traffic sources are providing the most conversions?

Finding out where your converting traffic is coming from is crucial to tracking your ROI. If you’re spending money on a PPC campaign, it’s useful to know how much of that traffic is converting into sales or new leads. If you’re having a re-think with your marketing budget then this information should be invaluable. We’ll assume that you’ve already set up goal tracking in your analytics account.

How to do this:

From the dashboard click ‘traffic sources’ and then click ‘all traffic sources’…

Click the ‘Goal Set 1’ or an alternative goal if you have more than one set up…

Click ‘advanced filter’; select the goal title as the metric and then edit the filter to show results for ‘greater than 0.00%’…

Click ‘apply filter’ and you’ll have a list of traffic sources sending you converting traffic, and their associated conversion rates.

What keywords are providing the most conversions?

As above, if you’re running a PPC campaign or any SEO work on your website, it’s really useful to know which keywords are providing you with converting traffic. Once you know what keywords are effectively earning you money, you can adjust your PPC or SEO work to focus on these keywords. You might also find that you’re spending money on keywords that aren’t converting.

How to do this:

From the dashboard click ‘traffic sources’ followed by ‘keywords’…

Click on the ‘Goal Set 1’ tab or any other suitable goal if you have more than one…

Scroll down and click on ‘advanced filter’; select the goal title as the metric and set the filter to show ‘greater than 0.00%’…

Click ‘apply filter’ and you’ll have a list of all the keywords that have provided converting traffic.

How is my latest blog post doing? How much traffic is it sending me, and what keywords are these visitors using?

This is probably one of my favourites. When you’ve worked hard on a blog post, you’ll probably want to track it’s progress. When tracking a particular piece of content it’s useful to find out how many views it’s had. More specifically it’s great to know how many entrances from Google your new post has received and which keywords are sending that traffic.

How to do this:

From the dashboard click ‘content’ followed by ‘top landing pages’…

Add a new field for ‘keyword’…

Scroll down and click ‘advanced filter’; select ‘page’ as the dimension and then type in the url for the page you are tracking…

Click ‘apply filter’ and you’ll have a nice list of all the keywords that have sent you traffic to that page.

Analytics go into far more detail than this, and you can create some truly amazing reports using filters. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments or send me a tweet @jonquinton1

Posted in SEO Blog