Understanding the Cost of “Free”

Let’s face it: It is great that Google offers a free analytics tool that tracks all your traffic and allows you to slice-it and dice-it by a variety of different dimensions. You can have a tremendous amount of insight into how your website is performing, where your traffic is coming from, which content is most effective, what users are doing when they get to your site and more.

However, on the downside, in the “Information Rights and Publicity” section of Google’s Terms of Service, they have the right to use the data internally as they see fit. (Insert “crickets chirping in the woods” soundtrack.)  On top of that, you need to be able to really understand all the data you’re presented with, and have the time to analyze and understand it properly.

So, the first issue is, in a free product, is sharing the information on your Web traffic worth the price of receiving the service? The short answer is usually yes, especially if you are a smaller fish. If you are a big fish, then you would most likely prefer to pay for an analytics system to protect the privacy of your web traffic data.

But let’s assume you want to use Google Analytics to monitor your Web traffic. Let’s face it: hundreds of thousands of businesses do! The next questions are: (1) do you know how to read the data, (2) what does the data actually mean, and (3) what to do with the data?

Understanding the Data
What’s the difference between a new visitor and a unique visitor? What’s a bounce? Where does “direct” traffic really come from?  Google provides lots of help information that requires some hunting but, once you find it, really help you to understand what each of these dimensions can mean for your business.  You should spend quality time learning about each of these dimensions (and others) before trying to interpret the data you’re getting from Google Analytics.

Interpreting the Data
Did you know that the “Traffic Sources by Keyword” dimension in Google Analytics mixes organic data with paid data? And that it mixes Google keywords (the terms you bid on) with actual search terms (the terms visitors search on) for the other search engines?  Forgetting these nuances in reporting can have real impacts on the decisions you make when managing a pay-per-click campaign or SEO strategy, so be sure to pay careful attention.

Using the Data
Your unique visitors are decreasing this month. So, what do you do? You receive most of your traffic from ten keywords. Now what? You are getting a lot of visitors internationally. Is that a good thing?  It can be tough to appropriately interpret the data you’re getting and turn that into actionable intelligence.  A decrease in one month across your established keywords may not indicate a trend–but over three months? You may have something to worry about.  For instance, perhaps your keyword strategy is getting old. Or maybe competition for those keywords is increasing even as inventory (or search volume) for those keywords stays flat.  Or, perhaps your SEO strategy is failing to keep pace.  It’s very important to tie changes in data to the facts on the ground before making decisions about how best to react.

Clearly, getting the data is half the battle. However, don’t underestimate that it is also important to be able to understand the data, interpret the data and most importantly, make the data actionable, so it benefits your business. This can be a full-time job and is one of the main reasons why marketers, agencies and webmasters leverage sophisticated technology to increase their Web traffic while minimizing the time it takes to do so.

Which leads me to a small plug: using our Yield Web Marketing Suite can be a great way to bring a murky landscape of data into more specific relief.  Because our algorithms take data as it’s revealed in real-time and use that data to improve your natural search, paid search and landing page optimization results, it saves you from having to deeply analyze (and understand) the volumes of data Google Analytics presents — particularly if you want to run a search engine marketing campaign across all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing).

While our own system is not a replacement for Google Analytics, it is a terrific complement and can really help to reduce the amount of time you spend wrestling with mountains of data — even if it is “free.”