For organizations both big and small knowing where your website visitors are coming from is critical. Website referral sources are important in understanding the reach of your site, and determine the effectiveness of your marketing channels. In a recent blog, we discussed the importance of referral metrics for your site, and now we'd like to dive in to a specific shortcoming in Google Analytics' reporting and what you can do to resolve the issue.
According to Internet Live Stats, more than 3.4 billion Google searches occur daily. A small handful of those searches are people who end up on your website. Seeing the search terms that users are typing in can provide good perspective on how relevant your site is in online search and provide direction on how to improve your search engine optimization. One problem: most of the data in Google Analytics can't be read due to a Google-enacted security feature. Encrypted searches are causing an overwhelming percentage of organic searches to be classified as (not provided) by Google Analytics. Because of this issue, large amounts of data are being missed and hindering marketers. One company, however, believes that they have found a solution to the (not provided) problem: Keyword Hero.
Keyword Hero is an application that matches organic sessions in Google Analytics with the most probable keyword. Keyword Hero decodes (not provided) results to shed light on the keyword queries used by your visitors. Keyword Hero gathers all of this data through an extensive series of data points and testing. In an interview, Daniel Schmeh (CTO of Keyword Hero), explained the data deduction process as "a matter of getting access to the data and engineering around it." Keyword Hero's methods are still guesswork, but highly informed guesswork with strong reliability standards.
In addition to providing the raw organic search data, Keyword Hero provides smart dimensions on the data for applicable marketing uses:
- Position: See your site's ranking within search results to identify ranking improvement opportunities
- Brand detection: Captures brand keywords to segment out performance of brand vs non-brand keywords
- Clusters: Instead of only capturing single sessions, Keyword Hero can group users by intent as a way to give informed audience insights and help recommend improvements.
The inclusion of keyword data through Keyword Hero allows the information to be leveraged throughout your analytics platform. Not only can you get general audience and engagement insights: Session duration, bounce rate, total visits, etc. You can also then leverage the keyword data to link up with your conversion & ecommerce data.
Keyword Hero is easily integrated into Google Analytics by signing up for an account and connecting Google Analytics to the Keyword Hero app.
Keyword Hero Benefits & Uses
Interestingly, the (not provided) change is seen as controversial, because Google provides keyword data for traffic referred from its paid search program. So, in a sense, Google is saying that the information is okay to share as long as it was paid for…and the revenue is going to Google. There is a wealth of data provided from paid search keywords, that is now provided to organic search through the use of Keyword Hero. Insights like CTR, ranking, and other engagement metrics can now be applied to organic keywords. Maybe as important, marketers can then use organic search keyword performance and compare to paid keyword performance.
Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz, said that one reason that businesses don't emphasize SEO or allocate sufficient resources in the area is that it can be difficult to attribute SEO to conversions or revenue. With Keyword Hero marketers can apply organic keywords to conversion data and finally determine what keywords are contributing to conversions and revenue.
Fishkin also notes that there could be benefits of Keyword Hero not limited to reporting. With an increased amount of keyword data provided by Keyword Hero, content teams can make informed decisions on content creation and give data-driven recommendations on web content edits. Web designers could use the keyword data to restructure the layout of pages, and rework online funnels using the keyword conversion data.
Imagine if you're an online ecommerce website selling bicycles. Before, all you saw was (not provided). Now, you see sessions created from different types of bikes: mountain bikes, road bikes, racing bikes, etc. The new keyword data provided by Keyword Hero could open up the possibility of creating content campaigns centering around the differences among the bike types and what consumers they're right for. Web designers could determine ways to rearrange web pages to emphasize the different bikes, and make the site navigation easier to buy bikes by different styles.
One of the mysteries of SEO is determining where to start your optimization work and what data points are available to help inform your work. Keyword Hero will give you the information necessary to enact change on your website and with your marketing activities.
Keyword Hero can be utilized in conjunction with other SEO tools and metrics such as Google's Search Console, which provides basic site management and crawling information, and technical data points such as page load time, and pages indexed.
Referral traffic from organic search can provide valuable insight into who your customers are and where they are coming from. Unfortunately, much of the data is locked away behind the (not available) designation. Keyword Hero is a solution within Google Analytics that unlocks much of that data. With that data at your disposal you will be able to apply organic keywords to engagement and conversion metrics within Google Analytics. Ultimately, this data will give you the ability to make informed changes to your website and marketing activities, reaching your customers in more targeted ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment