Beyond Google Analytics: five steps to a better-performing website
Davey Winder goes in search of the crucial online insights that Google won’t tell you
Google Analytics isn’t the be-all and end-all of d i g i t a l m a r k e t i ng . Davey Winder speaks to the experts in search of five crucial online insights that Google won’t tell you.
Way back in 1996, when the web was young,
Bill Gates published an article about th web entitled “Content is King”. at’s a maxim that remains true this da – no matter how hard you work maximising traffic to yo websit there’s no substitute fo great that makes people keep coming
Even so, it takes ta eted optimisation to make your effective as it can You know how visitors are inte with your pages, identify drawing them in – and anything that might drive them
The easiest way to discover all of this is with Google Analytics. In the 16 years since its launch, this freemium tool has become the go-to for online marketers the world over, providing a simple way to monitor and analyse your web traffic.
Yet while Google Analytics makes a great starting point for digital marketing, that doesn’t mean it’s where online businesses should end their efforts. There’s more going on than just what Google Analytics will show you, and if you can’t see the big picture then online opportunities are likely to pass you by.
So, what are these other metrics your online business should be
looking at? We’ ve been talking to digital marketing experts to find out, with responses focusing on two main areas: first, how to get better insights, an d th en how to take action and improve the effectiveness of your website.
GET BETTER INSIGHTS 1 Don’t treat GA as gospel
The breadth and clarity of information you get from Google
Analytics can be compelling, but our experts agree that you shouldn’t rely solely on this one source.
“Google Analytics traffic is broken,” declared Luke Budka, head of digital PR and SEO at B2B agency TopLine Comms ( toplinecomms.com). “It died a death in the UK, and across EU states abiding by GDPR, in July 2019.” That’s when the Information Commissioners’ Office made “non-essential” marketing cookies opt-out by default–including the ones that Google uses to track visitor activity.
To test the impact of this, TopLine submitted a Freedom of Information request for the ICO’s own website. “We hypothesised that very few people would voluntarily opt into marketing analytics – and year on year, the ICO recorded an 85% session drop off. The new cookie rule had destroyed the ICO’s own ability to track website users.”
That implies that Google might only be giving you information on around 15% of your users – so Budka suggests you focus on keyword
“You should understand what your prospects are searching for when looking to buy, and when they simply want information”
rankings too using Google’s free Search Console tool, which can expose the keywords that bring users to your website (see search.google.com/searchconsole/about).
“Different keywords are suited to different parts of the buying journey,” he said. “You should understand what your prospects are searching for when looking to buy, and what they search for when they simply want information. Then make sure you’ve got great content on your site that will rank for both types of prospect.”
Budka also pointed to Google’s beta Search Console Insights tool
(search.google.com/search-console/
insights/about). This provides detail on your best-performing pieces of content, plus valuable information such as what people were searching for on Google before visiting your site.
“Search Console Insights will give you detail on your content that’s trending, the content that your website visitors spend the most time engaging with, and your content that ranks in the top five organic results,” explained Budka. “This helps you add the right calls to action to your most popular pieces of content.” Search Console Insights doesn’t require any technical expertise to use, so it’s perfect for small businesses without dedicated marketing teams.
Budka’s thoughts are echoed by Lydia German, marketing and outreach coordinator with Tao Digital Marketing ( taodigitalmarketing.
com). “The Performance report in Google Search Console is incredibly valuable,” German noted. “It allows you to see the average ranking of your pages, their impressions and click-through rate, and other special features, such as rich results.”
2 Check your site content
The Search Console isn’t just about passively tracking your numbers: you can use it to direct your SEO strategy and improve the overall performance of your site. “If queries have high impressions and low CTR, that means your site is visible in the search results, but isn’t receiving as many clicks as it should,” said
German. “That means you need to improve your page title and meta description to better match what users are looking for, and make the page content more enticing.
“The queries list also provides a gold mine of keyword data. If you don’t see your expected keywords on this list, that suggests that your site content doesn’t square with what potential customers are searching for. This will give you the opportunity to better target keywords through existing content or by creating new pages.”
Anna Morrish, a director at digital marketing agency Quibble Content ( quibble.digital), concurred on the importance of ensuring your site content fits with people’s s earches – and she noted that mismatches aren’t always to do with the wrong content. “Some sites are let down by simple spelling and grammatical errors,” Morrish warned. “If your website has numerous errors such as these, your keyword rankings are likely to be affected. One tool we use for checking the content on a website is Screaming Frog ( screamingfrog.co.uk). It has a function that allows you to select a language and scan an entire website.
“Along with identifying errors, Screaming Frog provides a wealth of data that can highlight pages that have little to no content on, which will struggle to rank. It provides a clear list of your existing metadata and title tags too, so you can see whether any information is missing, duplicated or unoptimised, all of which can affect your rankings.”
External factors can play a part too. If your site has recently seen a dip in traffic then, Morrish pointed out, “it’s possible that bad links are negatively impacting your website”.
A tool that can help here is Ahrefs ( ahrefs.com). “Simply enter your URL, and Ahrefs will generate a list of referring domains and backlinks,” said Morrish. “From here, you can see which links have been lost and create a strategy to regain them – if they’re worth it, based on the metrics i t shows – or remove irrelevant links or spam. If need be, you can use the disavow tool in the Search Console to tell Google that you’re not affiliated with an external site.”
3 Compare with competitors
Ahrefs isn’t just limited to checking your own site. “You can also use the tool to look at your competitors,” Morrish pointed out, “and identify sites linking to them that might also be encouraged to link to your website. By targeting high-authority sites with good metrics, you can increase your own rankings, boost traffic and get further brand exposure.”
Lydia German offered additional advice on this front: “Another great tool for measuring your online business performance is Semrush ( semrush.com),” German told us. “After entering your own URL, you can check the sites of your known competitors – or allow the tool to automatically identify likely rivals based on relative keyword and SEO performance.
“This helps you to identify trends in the industry – for example, in one particular year all companies might see a dip in traffic. And it also enables you to see which of your competitors are gaining market share.”
And Semrush isn’t just about tracking your rivals’ performance – it can also help you compete, by conducting a keyword and content gap analysis. Simply put, that means it can identify the specific search terms for which someone else is ranking above you.
“Using this information, you can review and update the content on your website, using your competitor as a comparison,” said German – “or it may be that you need to create a new page entirely. Since the tool will provide you with information on how many monthly searches each keyword and term receive, it can help you prioritise new content too: you can identify questions that your target audience is actively asking, and build blog posts that provide answers into your content calendar.”
“You can look at your competitors and identify sites linking to them that might also be encouraged to link to your website”
Another recommended tool for staying on top of online performance is Advanced Web Ranking
( advancedwebranking.com). “You can add your own details, but you can also add details of your competitors to keep up to date with any gains they see, allowing you to adjust where necessary,” German said.
For Cameron Lyall, senior SEO manager at search agency iCrossing UK ( icrossing.co.uk), the issue boils do w n t o k e y w o r ds – s p e c i f i c a ll y “w h a t keywords you rank for, the position and the average monthly search volume. This is going to give you the best insight into what your customers are searching for and what they want from you.” He also pointed out that Microsoft’s Bing offers its own set of webmaster tools ( bing.com/
webmasters), which may give you a more rounded view than you’d get from Google alone.
“Both of these services will tell you the number of clicks and impressions you’re getting from a keyword. The data won’t be 100% accurate to the traffic you are getting from search engines, but it can help you identify peaks in searches and explain any change in traffic. It’s also useful to use third-party tools like Semrush and Ahrefs: these will help track the keywords you really care about, and also give a wide range of non-branded terms you might not find using the search providers’ own tools.”
IMPROVE YOUR STANDING 4 Create the sort of site that Google likes
“To take your SEO strategy to the next level, you need to understand the experience your customers are having with your site,” said Lyall. “Core Web Vitals is the latest update from
Google, which is all about measuring your site speed and usability performance. Customers like fast-loading pages, so that’s the type of site that Google wants to rank.”
This means you need to test the speed of your pages. It’s not hard to find site-performance tools – if anything, the challenge is that there are so many to choose from. “I suggest starting with Google’s Page Speed Insights tool,” said Lyall. “This is where you get the best understanding of how Google rates your site. The tool scores you out of 100, but it’s the metrics it uses that you really want to pay close attention to.”
Dave Robinson, the founder and strategy lead at digital marketing agency Red Evolution ( redevolution. com) drew our attention to another free Google service, named Google Optimize ( optimize.google.com), which lets you field-test different page designs and technologies in a real-world context.
“This tool takes the guesswork out of establishing the most effective words, design layouts and even button text and colours,” he told us. “Essentially, Google Optimize lets you clone your existing pages and edit the clones. Then, once the edits have been done, you can choose what proportion of search traffic to send to each of the page variations: for example, to carry out a simple A/B test, you could send 50% of search traffic to the original page and 50% to the experimental page.
“As the experiment runs, you can use a predefined metric to decide which version of the page is more effective, such as which one generates the most enquiries or leads. It takes the guesswork out of creating pages that perform and add value to a business.”
“If you focus only on a channel’s ability to generate new leads, you’re missing a very important part of the picture”
5 Keep customers with CRM
The self-evident purpose of all of this optimisation is bringing customers to your website, and hopefully getting them to make a purchase. Ideally, though, that ought to be be just the start of a long and profitable relationship. Larry Kotch, founder and director at digital agency
The Brains ( thebrains marketing.co.uk), urges businesses to focus on the long term.
“For any B2B, going off analytics alone is actually incredibly dangerous,” he told PC Pro. “What matters to businesses that deliver services or have a sales team are marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads and customer lifetime value. Knowing how your channels contribute to leads, and the average profitability of each channel based on the customers it generates, is how you really understand which marketing activities are working.”
Kotch added: “With Google Analytics you can get reports of traffic and conversions by channel, but you really need a CRM like HubSpot ( hubspot.com) or Salesforce ( salesforce.com) that can import the analytics information and ad IDs and track the progress of those leads down the sales pipeline.
“With HubSpot we are able to do this all automatically. The key thing is combining your website analytics data with your CRM data. Most B2B businesses have a three-to-twelvemonth sales cycle; if you focus only on a channel’s ability to generate new leads, you’re missing a very important part of the picture, which is what happens to these leads over time.”
Kotch points out that tracking real business outcomes by advertising channels can paint a very different picture to lead attribution by channel. “In our case it guided us to invest in channels that generated fewer leads by number, but which ultimately led to larger retainers. This way, we’re optimising for what really matters, not just the vanity metrics available through GA.”
So, there you have it: five ways to take your website analytics beyond what Google tells you, and make your online presence work as hard as possible. If you have any other tools or ideas you would like to share with fellow PC Pro readers, email them to letters@pcpro.co.uk – and let us know if any of these suggestions work for you.