It is an intuitive, easy-to-use platform designed to help marketers get a better view of their performance.

In this Supermetrics review, I’ll walk you through using this analytics software, its features, and pros and cons so you can decide if it’s the right solution for your business.

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What Is Supermetrics?

Supermetrics is a user-friendly analytics platform that helps marketers measure and analyze performance across multiple digital marketing channels:

This is an invaluable marketing tool for businesses that are looking to take control of their digital marketing analytics. The platform offers a powerful suite of features that allow users to quickly analyze campaigns across multiple channels and marketing platforms, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions.

Its intuitive dashboard makes it easy to access important metrics from major networks such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube Analytics, and Twitter Ads. Plus, its automation capabilities help speed up time-consuming tasks like data extraction, reporting, and monitoring.

Dive Deeper:
* Best Analytics Agency: Top 8 Choices for 2023 and Beyond
* A Simple Hack to Combine Facebook Ads and Google Ads
* Google Analytics for Content Marketing: How to Track and Improve Your ROI

Supermetrics Pricing

Supermetrics offers a wide variety of pricing solutions. In fact, their pricing is so granular that it’s nearly impossible to give you a comprehensive overview in this review!

They’ve divided their pricing solutions into the following categories:

• Spreadsheets – Supermetrics for Google Sheets, Supermetrics for Excel
• Data Visualization – Supermetrics for Data Studio
• Data Extraction – Supermetrics APIU
• Google Analytics – Supermetrics Uploader
• Data Warehouses – Supermetrics for BigQuery, Supermetrics for Snowflake, Supermetrics for Azure Synapse, Supermetrics for RedShift, Supermetrics for Azure SQL Database, Supermetrics for Google AlloyDB
• Cloud Storage and Data Lakes – Supermetrics for Amazon S3, Supermetrics Google Cloud Storage, Supermetrics for Azure Storage

Prices range from $39 per month billed annually all the way up to custom enterprise solutions requiring you to call for a quote.

There’s also a free trial specific to the tool you choose to integrate. In order to access the free trial, you first have to select which software solution you want to use with Supermetrics.

Getting Started with Supermetrics

Getting started with Supermetrics is easy and straightforward.

The first step, of course, is to sign up for an account on Supermetrics.com. Once you’ve created your account, you can choose which product you’d like to use. You can also navigate through their help center to find more information about their products and how they can benefit you.

Free Trial

If you want to take advantage of the Supermetrics free trial, it’s pretty easy.

Just click on the “Start free trial” button and it will guide you through the process. I chose Supermetrics for Google Sheets because that’s what I use the most often to track analytics.

Unfortunately, the free trial is only available for integrations that already have an established pricing structure. For tools that require reaching out for a quote, you cannot start a free trial until you communicate with Supermetrics.

I clicked the “Use Template” button and it automatically populated a Google Sheet with further instructions:

I was able to install Supermetrics as an add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace and continued setting it up from there.

Related Content: 10 Underrated SEO Reporting Metrics That’ll Impress Your Clients in 2023

Features and Integrations

Supermetrics offers a wide variety of features and integrations that can help you analyze your campaigns, extract data, create reports, and monitor performance.

Here’s a brief overview of some of their most popular features:

• Automated Reporting Tools – lets you automate the creation of custom reports so you don’t have to manually compile data.
• Data Extraction – makes it easy to extract data from various networks and platforms, including Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube Analytics, Twitter Ads, Bing Ads and more.
• Data Visualization – offers powerful data visualization tools to help you quickly identify trends and patterns in your data.
• Dashboard – comprehensive dashboard provides easy access to important metrics from the major networks in one place for quick analysis.
• Automation – offers powerful automation capabilities to help speed up time-consuming tasks.
• Real-Time Monitoring – allows you to monitor live data for who is currently accessing your site in real-time, providing an overview of the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
• Multiple File Formats – supports multiple file formats, including Excel, CSV and Google Sheets, allowing marketers to easily import their data into Supermetrics for analysis.

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Using Supermetrics with…

As you can see from the pricing rundown, there are a lot of different tools that you can integrate with Supermetrics. These tools allow you to use your existing processes and systems to better analyze your marketing campaigns.

Here are just a few of the tools that you can use with Supermetrics:

• Google Analytics – Link your accounts together and easily extract data from Analytics for more comprehensive reporting.
• Google Sheets and Excel – Automatically extract data from various sources and display them in spreadsheets for easier analysis.
• Google Data Studio – Create engaging visualizations and dashboards by combining your extracted data with Data Studio’s powerful tools.
• APIs – Supermetrics also offers an API (application programming interface, which helps you integrate application software) that allows you to securely access data from various sources.
• Data Visualization – Use Supermetrics for platforms like Tableau and Data Studio to visualize your data in more meaningful ways.

Now, let’s dive into each one a little further….

Supermetrics with Spreadsheets

When you use Supermetrics with spreadsheet tools like Excel or Google Sheets, you benefit from a number of features designed to make data analysis easier. For example, Supermetrics for Sheets and Excel has a powerful query builder that helps you quickly create queries to extract marketing data from various sources.

The spreadsheet add-on also offers built-in formulas that allow you to quickly combine multiple data sets or pivot data for more effective reporting. With Supermetrics for spreadsheets, you can also schedule reports to run at specific times and generate insights faster than ever before.

Supermetrics with Data Visualization

Using Supermetircs with data visualization tools like Data Studio or Tableau allows you to take your marketing reports to the next level.

You can easily create engaging visualizations and dashboards that display important insights in an understandable way. You can also use custom formulas to quickly generate metrics from your data, as well as customize the look and feel of the visuals for more impactful reports.

Related Content: 5 Powerful Ways to Increase Sales by Leveraging Data Effectively

Supermetrics with Data Extraction

The Supermetrics API is a powerful tool that makes it easy to extract data from multiple sources. With the API, you can securely access data from various networks and platforms, including Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube Analytics, Twitter Ads, Bing Ads and more.

The API also offers advanced features such as rate limiting, pagination and filtering to ensure that your requests are processed quickly and efficiently. With Supermetrics’ API, you can easily extract large amounts of data while keeping your requests secure.

Supermetrics with Google Analytics

The Supermetrics Uploader for Google Analytics allows you to quickly connect your accounts and retrieve data for more comprehensive analysis. You can easily schedule uploads to run at specific times and customize the fields that are included in the queries for better accuracy.

The Uploader also offers advanced features such as query chaining and filtering capabilities, allowing you to create complex reports faster than ever before. With the Supermetrics Uploader for Google Analytics, you can quickly gain insights into your marketing campaigns and make more informed decisions.

Dive Deeper: 9 Alternatives that Are Just as Good as Google Analytics

Supermetrics with Data Warehouses

The most comprehensive solution Supermetrics offers is their integration options for data warehouses such as BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Azure, and Google AlloyDB. With these integrations, you can easily move data from any source into a data warehouse for more complex analysis and reporting.

You can also set up scheduled extracts to ensure that your data is updated regularly and automatically. With Supermetrics’ data warehouse integrations, you can easily create comprehensive reports with advanced features like filtering, pivoting, and more.

Supermetrics with Cloud Storage and Data Lakes

Supermetrics offers solutions for storage options such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage. With these integrations, you can easily store any data from any source in a secure cloud environment with AES-256 encryption.

You can also set up scheduled extracts to ensure that your data is always up to date. With Supermetrics’ cloud storage and data lake integrations, you can easily store, organize, and analyze your data for more effective reporting.

Related Content: 6 Customer Service Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2023

Customer Service

Supermetrics has a great customer support team that is available to answer any questions or concerns you may have. They offer 24/7 support via email, phone, and live chat.

One of my favorite things about the live chat support is that they can help you troubleshoot any issues you may have with the software. This makes it much easier to get up and running faster than if you were trying to figure out things on your own. It’s a very comprehensive tool for finding answers, and they typically reply in less than five minutes!

There’s an extensive support center with lots of articles and tutorials to help you with the most common difficulties.

And their resource library (found on the top menu) is full of self-help options like customer success stories to lift you up, a template gallery to build your own tools, a blog, a podcast, technical documentation, and webinars. You don’t even have to chat, call or email for help most of the time.

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Supermetrics Final Assessment: Pros & Cons

Supermetrics makes it easy to extract, manipulate, and visualize data and web analytics from any source.

Pros:

• Great for business of all sizes from small businesses and entrepreneurs to enterprise solutions
• Integrates with many popular data sources and platforms
• Simple setup and easy to use
• Robust automation capabilities for more efficient reporting
• Helpful customer service team
• Free trial

Cons:

• Prices can be a bit on the expensive side for some solutions
• Can take some time to get familiar with all of their features and integrations
• No free plan
• Free trial is only available for select integrations

With its powerful query builder, automated scheduling tools, advanced visualization options and secure integrations with cloud storage and data warehouses, Supermetrics is the perfect tool for anyone looking to gain insight into their data quickly and efficiently.

Overall, Supermetrics is a great choice for businesses of all sizes that are looking to streamline and automate their reporting process.

 

Looking for more review posts? Check out:
* AWeber Review: Is It Worth It in 2023?
* UltraVPN Review: Is This 2022’s Best VPN?
* Surfer vs. Clearscope
* Moosend Review: Is This the Best Email Marketing Tool for Beginners?

The post Supermetrics Review: Is It Worth It in 2023? appeared first on Single Grain.

Digital marketing analytics is crucial for every business.

Data-driven insights by top analytics agencies help marketing teams consistently measure the impact of their marketing strategies and benchmark their own efforts. As a result, they can determine the specific areas that demand more time and resources for the success of their marketing campaigns.

Nowadays, companies have the data, but they are lacking data analytics experts who can obtain insights from the available data for better decision-making.

In this article, we’ll list the top eight digital analytics agencies as well as provide you with the info to help you select the best one to fuel your business growth.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

Top 8 Analytics Agencies

Analytics companies use analytics software to better understand their audience and personalize the customer experience for informed decision-making.

Here are the eight leading analytics agencies to consider:

1) Single Grain

Single Grain is a full-service digital marketing agency that offers analytics services to make your marketing campaigns super successful. They started out as a simple SEO agency a decade ago, and have successfully expanded into a leading data analytics company that has proven to boosted the performance of many brands’ marketing campaigns.

With CEO Eric Siu (who co-hosts the Marketing School podcast with Neil Patel, both of whom are considered top internet marketing experts), the analytics and data management team at Single Grain combines digital expertise and analytical skills to deliver demonstrated success for clients.

They are one of the best Google Analytics agencies that use their exceptional analytics skills and knowledge to turn data into a growth engine.

Key Services:

• Creation and implementation of sales marketing funnels
• Conversion optimization services
• SaaS marketing
• Content marketing
• E-commerce marketing
• NFT marketing
• Crypto marketing
• PPC services
• SEO services

What They Do Best:

• They focus on using their analytics expertise to create and implement powerful marketing funnels to convert website visitors into paying customers.
• Single Grain is a Google Premium Partner that uses the most advanced analytics tracking techniques to reach relevant prospects at the right time and in the right channels.
• They provide insightful and comprehensive reports that detail the progress of individual KPIs for measuring campaign performance.
• Single Grain has an experienced SEO team that uses different analytics tools and strategies to identify the bottlenecks and take the required actions to improve the flow of organic leads.
• They help you measure crucial metrics such as value per visitor, cost per conversion, site search keywords, and GA4 event measurements tracking.
• They have an expert social media marketing team that leverages analytics to create a personalized Facebook retargeting strategy for maximum leads and conversions.

Top Clients:

• Amazon
• Uber
• Airbnb
• Intuit
• Bittrex
• Polymath

Contact Details: contact@singlegrain.com, 1-800-701-0793

Pricing: They offer custom pricing plans as per your business goals and requirements.

Book My Free Marketing Analytics Consultation

2) WebFX

WebFX is a Pennsylvania-based digital marketing company that has generated over $3 billion in revenue and 7.8 million leads for its clients so far. They also have over 25 years’ of experience in running data-driven digital marketing campaigns.

With over 450 digital marketing experts in their team, WebFX is a leading data analytics company to fulfill your business advertising goals.

Key Services:

• User experience testing
• Landing page design
• SEO and PPC services
• Conversion optimization services
• Funnel creation
• Digital experience development
• ADA compliance services
• Voice assistant skills development
• Heat map and ClickStream testing

What They Do Best:

• They have a best-in-class marketing team that utilizes their analytical skills to identify your target market and work on making your site more visible to your audience.
• The team at WebFX uses different analytics tools to craft value-driven search ads, display ads, geo-targeted ads, and remarketing campaigns.
• They have a team of social media experts who analyze your competitors using different social analytics tools and strategies to create and execute a winning social media management plan that passes the right brand message to your desired audience.
• They provide real-time analysis on the performance of your website, such as how your sales pipeline appears, what are the activities of your competitors, and the available opportunities in your industry.
• They offer access to MarketingCloudFX to their clients that combine analytics features to track even the smallest details of each campaign, including all leads and sales, with complete accuracy.

Top Clients:

• Hilton
• Wrangler
• O’Reilly Autoparts
• Kangol
• Martin’s
• Subway

Contact Details: +1 (888) 601-5359

Pricing:

WebFX offers hourly or project-based pricing plans:

• Per hour pricing starts from $100-$149
• Per project pricing starts from $1,000

Dive Deeper: The Difference Between Retargeting and Remarketing

3) Seer Interactive

Seer Interactive is a digital experience agency offering services to improve campaign ROI powered by big data. It was founded in 2002 and headquartered in Philadelphia, PA, and has nearly two decades’ of experience in digital marketing with a 94% client satisfaction rate.

Seer Interactive has 200 plus business and analytics consultants who work as subject matter experts (SMEs) catering to clients’ needs in different segments such as SEO, PPC, CRO, and web design.

Key Services:

• Audience intelligence
• UX and content development
• Market research and competitive intelligence
• Web analytics and business insights management
• Conversion rate optimization
• Data-driven web designing
• Search engine optimization
• Pay per click advertising
• Enterprise analytics

What They Do Best:

• The Analytics team of Seer Interactive conceive user behavior on your site and pinpoints actionable insights that open up opportunities to nudge users further down the funnel.
• The data intelligence team works together with SEO, PPC, and CRO teams to identify key areas for improvement that lead to maximum conversions.
• They provide audience-first custom business plans to understand user behavior on both online and offline modes.
• They apply a GA4 measurement strategy aligned to your business goals and objectives to allow you to take the necessary action using the right data.
• Seer Interactive follows a data-driven methodology to offer a personalized content experience for your target audiences, leading to a higher conversion rate.
• They combine analytics with PPC to achieve an exceptional conversion rate. In one client case, they successfully increased the conversion rate by 69%.
• They use Closed Loop analytics solutions to help tie web actions to different lead generation activities.
• They power up your marketing and advertising campaigns with Google Analytics 360 Remarketing, which leads to higher ROI and revenue.

Top Clients:

• AAMCO
• Adaptive Insights
• Autodesk
• BBVA Compass
• American Greetings
• ASOS

Contact Details: (215) 967-4461

Pricing Seer Interactive offers custom pricing plans as per your project requirements.

4) Rise Interactive

Rise Interactive was established in 2004 as a full-service digital marketing agency, and has offices at multiple locations, including Chicago, Buenos Aires and Mexico City.

Their major expertise lies in advanced analytics, digital media, and customer experience. They also have experience serving different types of clients, such as consumer services, consumer products, and B2B brands. The marketing team of Rise Interactive also won the B2B Marketing Elevation Award in 2021.

Key Services:

• Customer experience analytics
• Closed-loop marketing analytics
• CRM and predictive analytics
• SEO and PPC services
• Affiliate, social media, and email marketing
• Web and mobile app development
• Content marketing
• Customer lifetime value analysis
• Competitive intelligence
• Customer experience optimization

What They Do Best:

• Rise Interactive’s advanced analytics services combine statistics, predictive analytics, customer modeling, and industry data to provide a custom marketing plan to reach your business goals.
• The analytics team helps you create customer persona segmentation, perform customer lifetime value analysis, and conduct competitor analysis to properly define your target audience and target market.
• The data analytics experts at Seer Interactive help you to understand complex customer interactions, improve UX, and increase conversion using custom-designed testing methodologies and advanced statistics.
• They use advanced analytics reports to find potential high-value customers and implement lead scoring so that you can target your prospects more efficiently and invest wisely.
• Seer Interactive uses insights from analytics to perform testing, implementation, and measurement to improve customer experience, increase engagement, and optimize conversions.

Top Clients:

• Reynolds
• Blue Diamond Growers
• Wave
• Cardinal Health
• American Lung Association
• Colour Pop

Contact Details: +1 (312) 281-9933

Pricing Rise Interactive offers its services on hourly rates that vary between $50 and $99.

Book My Free Marketing Analytics Consultation

5) AMP Agency

AMP Agency is a full-service digital marketing agency headquartered in Boston. It has offices located in different locations across the USA, such as Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Seattle, and San Francisco.

They have over 300 marketing experts offering custom growth solutions infused with unmatched insights for maximum sales, as well as experience working with clients in different industries, such as consumer electronics, franchise, retail, gaming, sports and apparel, CPG, entertainment and media, fashion and footwear, travel, etc.

Key Services:

• Experiential marketing
• Performance analytics
• Advanced marketing analytics
• Path-to-purchase analysis
• A/B testing
• Media mix modeling
• Social media marketing and management
• Third-party competitive intelligence
• Website tracking
• Customer segmentation and behavioral modeling

What They Do Best:

• AMP Agency has a dedicated analytics team to dig into the data and design a customized solution for each business.
• They have a unified team of data analysts, statisticians, and social scientists who work together and apply appropriate analytics methodologies to generate the maximum returns from your marketing investments.
• They focus on combining actionable insights and data visualizations to reach prospects at different buyer journey stages.
• They employ a four-stage approach to marketing – discovery, solution design, analysis, insights – to generate long-term revenue for their clients.
• Their team has expertise in performance analytics, advanced analytics, research, and business intelligence to drive more relevant leads.
• The AMP agency analytics team conducts performance analytics involving data governance and integrated analytics to design a custom measurement strategy to determine the ROI of marketing campaigns.
• They offer custom analytics development, custom tagging codes based on different goals, platform integrations, report development, execution, and ad hoc analysis.
• The data analytics experts of AMP agency perform detailed research on ad effectiveness, persona development, brand loyalty, brand satisfaction, brand exploration, concept testing, path-to-purchase analysis, and online voice of the consumer surveys.

Top Clients:

• DirecTV
• Honda
• FX
• Adobe
• Disney
• Nike

Contact Details: (617) 837-8200

Pricing AMP Agency offers custom pricing plans as per your business goals and requirements.

6) Blast Analytics

Blast Analytics is a digital marketing and analytics consulting service with offices in California, Chicago, Dallas, London, San Francisco, and New York.

They are a certified Adobe and Google Partner as well as a full-service market intelligence company to provide you with a roadmap to success.

Key Services:

• Digital analytics strategy
• Digital analytics implementation
• Analytics maturity assessment
• Tag management
• Analytics audits
• Data integration and management
• Data-driven testing

What They Do Best:

• Blast helps you design and implement an integrated marketing analytics strategy to improve decision-making and forecast consumer behavior.
• They help you determine what data needs to be collected and work with your internal teams to ensure accurate data collection.
• Their data analytics specialists create custom marketing dashboards to determine areas for improvement.
• The team at Blast Analytics is experienced in handling enterprise analytics tools such as Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Snowplow, R and Big Query, MixPanel, ClickTale, Optimizely, and others.
• The team helps you conduct analytics and set up audits to ensure that everything is tracked accurately.
• They have a strong team of data visualization consultants to help you explore, analyze, and visualize your data for informed decision-making.

Top Clients:

• The North Face
• Intuit
• NBA
• Wall Street Journal
• Quicken
• Equinix

Contact Details: (888) 252-7866, solutions@blastam.com

Pricing: Blast Analytics offers custom pricing plans as per your business goals and requirements.

Dive Deeper: Making Data-Driven Decisions for Better Website UX

7) Disruptive Advertising

Disruptive Advertising is an award-winning tech-based marketing service agency founded in 2012. This U.S.-based company mainly deals with advertising. They aim to grow your business through analytics, Google Ads and Facebook Ads based on dynamic digital marketing strategy.

They have 130+ full-time employees and have a record of managing $100M+ in annual spending, optimizing thousands of web pages, sending tens of thousands of emails/texts/chats, and analyzing hundreds of thousands of data points each year.

Key Services:

• Analytics and Business Intelligence
• Google tag manager implementation
• Lifecycle marketing
• Website optimization
• Paid Search (Google Ads and Bing Ads)
• Paid Social (Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, Snapchat Ads, TikTok Ads, and Pinterest Ads)
• OTT (Hulu Ads, Microsoft Ads, and YouTube Ads)
• Audio Ads (Spotify Ads and Pandora Ads)
• Email Marketing
• Conversion Rate Optimization

What They Do Best:

• The team at Disruptive Advertising has deep expertise in web analytics, which they utilize in dealing with creative/social ads and paid search ads, including Google, Bing, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest Ads, as well as audio ads, etc.
• They use Google/Adobe analytics, call tracking, tag management, heat mapping, and CRM integrations to track users’ activities on your site to construct hypotheses for split testing and measure actual revenue contribution to your business.
• They have a specialized team to create a CRO strategy based on your company’s unique needs.
• The data analytics experts also perform a detailed analytics audit on your site and provide the information needed to optimize your website.
• They create a full-funnel marketing strategy leveraging the best platforms and services, including social and audio channels.
• They offer optimization services for lead generation by using landing page tactics and full-funnel micro-conversion optimization methods that drive maximum calls and form fills.

Top Clients:

• Death Wish Coffee Co.
• Fandango
• PennyMac
• Adobe
• Litter-Robot
• Columbia Southern University

Contact Details: (877) 956-7510

Pricing: The minimum project size starts at $1,000 with an hourly rate of $100-$149/hr.

Related Content: How This E-commerce Store Doubled Its Revenue Using Our Facebook Ads Advice

8) Brainlabs

Brainlabs is one of the best data analytics companies. With offices in Seattle, LA, Austin, and New York City, this agency makes their entire marketing strategies data-oriented and scientific.

Brainlabs has a dedicated data science team to turn marketing insights into crucial predictions for preparing data-driven marketing strategies.

Key Services:

• Digital strategy preparation
• Data measurement and analytics
• SEO marketing
• MarTech support
• Programmatic ads
• Social media marketing
• Paid search and social ads
• CRO services
• Data Science training

What They Do Best:

• The experts at Brainlabs are mathematicians, scientists, and programmers who take an analytical approach to every marketing campaign they handle.
• Their marketing perspective is entirely data-driven to bring remarkable results in all their services, including SEO, PPC, paid search, CRO, and paid social.
• They offer data strategy services that involve acquiring the right data, storing it, and building the best framework to identify business trends and opportunities.
• They employ advanced econometrics, modeling, and forecasting methodologies to evaluate the impact of strategies and media channels on your business.
• They have reporting experts who build custom data dashboards for the marketing and sales team and key stakeholders to drive accurate decisions.
• The dedicated team of data scientists analyses billions of data points to predict the most valuable and long-term customers, the best channel for advertising and promotion, and the items most likely to be purchased.

Top Clients:

• American Express
• Adidas
• Papa John’s
• Boots
• Mars
• Financial Times

Contact Details: +1 812-330-3134, partnerships@brainlabsdigital.com

Pricing: Brainlabs offers custom pricing plans as per your business goals and requirements.

What Is Marketing Analytics?

Marketing analytics is significantly becoming a vital element of the total marketing expenditure, growing its market share at an impressive rate: By 2031, the market valuation of digital analytics is expected to reach up to $27.2 billion.

Marketing analytics is the study of data by experts, which helps businesses make data-informed decisions. Essentially, it is a sub-discipline of business analytics that also covers financial, sales, product/service, and customer analytics.

Data analytics companies take a holistic approach to analytics, and they have a strong technical background to help identify the bottlenecks in your marketing strategy.

With data-driven analytics, your marketing team has a better understanding of:

• Targeting the right audience segment(s)
• Using the right marketing channels to reach each segment
• Creating convincing messages, creatives, and ad copy to woo buyers from each segment
• Calculating the amount spent on acquiring new customers

Therefore, data analytics allows marketers to design effective marketing funnels with the highest ROI. The marketing team can discover the key areas of improvement to boost the performance of digital marketing campaigns.

Book My Free Marketing Analytics Consultation

Why Do You Need an Analytics Agency?

Analytics agencies have the necessary experience and expertise to help businesses boost their sales and increase revenue. Such capabilities make an analytics agency an absolute must for every business.

To thrive in this fiercely competitive market, businesses need keen insights in order to perform better. So if you want to make your marketing efforts super effective, you need to know the following things:

• The channels with the lowest customer acquisition cost and the widest reach
• Your and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
• Available opportunities to improve your regular profit margins
• The number of repeat customers, those willing to spend more, and those who are most likely to refer your business to others
• Campaigns that are worth expanding and those that need to be called off immediately

Top IT services analytics companies can help businesses:

• Increase the number of leads by optimizing the organic and inorganic marketing methods
• Obtain significant insights about customer behavior and preferences
• Identify untapped customer segments
• Personalize the customer experience to improve sales
• Analyze the past data and predict future trends
• Gain insights into their competitor’s marketing activity
• Reach the desired business goals within the deadline

Dive Deeper:
* 9 Alternatives that Are Just as Good as Google Analytics
* How to Use Predictive Analytics for Better Marketing Performance
* Google Analytics for Content Marketing: How to Track and Improve Your ROI

How to Choose an Analytics Agency

Here are some of the essential things to look for before you hire an analytics agency:

1) Credibility

The credibility of any analytics agency is the first thing a business should look for before hiring one.

Check whether the company has testimonials and reviews on its website. Examine them to see if the reviews seem authentic. Authentic testimonials will mention the name of the clients, their designation, and the name of the company they belong to at the bottom of the quote, like this:

Not all agencies will meet these standards. Therefore, it is wise to scrutinize the customer testimonials before selecting any agency.

2) Case Studies

Case studies convey real-life examples of how an agency helped its clients with their analytics skills.

You should check out some of the case studies on the agency’s website. It would be best if you could find something related to your industry, but regardless, a case study will show you what the agency is capable of.

Focus on tangible, lasting results, and grasp the nature of the strategy which drove the result. Then relate it to your marketing issues and see if they can help your business. If case studies are not available on an agency’s website, then that could be a red flag.

3) Industry Experience

An analytics agency with clients in the same industry as yours is a plus for your business.

Working with a data analytics agency that has experience handling business metrics means they are well aware of what works and what doesn’t. Some analytics agencies specifically mention their expertise on their website. If they don’t, look for the list of their clients on their site, which will give you a better idea of the industries they have worked for.

4) Analytics Certifications

A reputable analytics agency will display a list of their certifications and partnership with Google, Facebook, HubSpot, and other industry-leading analytics tools. You should check out these certifications and business partnership logos on their website.

Having top analytics software logos on their website means they are knowledgeable, innovative and experienced. If you see names like Google and Facebook in their list of partners, it indicates that they are well experienced in achieving their clients’ objectives and key results.

Related Content: How To Write Data-Driven Posts

What Do Analytics Agencies Do?

The expertise of marketing analytics agencies helps you make better decisions, which drives more revenue to your business. Specifically, marketing analytics services use different weekly or daily metrics to tangibly measure your business’ overall performance online.

For example, they evaluate traffic by channel, clicks per visit/time spent on site, revenue per visitor, cost per conversion, lead to close ratio, and the overall ROI. These evaluations help them determine the best ways to promote your business.

Here are the top three services offered by digital analytics providers:

1) Measuring CAC and ROI

It is often difficult for a business to compare the cost of acquiring a new customer and the cost to serve them.

Analytics agencies provide a clear picture of your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and ROI, helping you balance the two and generate the maximum revenue from your marketing investments. CAC refers to the total amount you spend to acquire a new customer – including all the sales and marketing expenses that you pay to get those customers:

2) Assigning Credit to the Touchpoints

Crediting the channels that generate conversions is called attribution modeling. All the touchpoints of your customers are identified before they convert so that you understand the mediums that best assist in sales.

Marketing analytics agencies help you analyze and understand your customers’ digital journeys before they turn into customers and discover the exact channels where they came in contact.

3) Optimizing Campaign

Choosing the best marketing and advertising channels or tactics that bring in the highest returns demands in-depth data analysis.

A good marketing analytics team performs different tests for both organic listings and paid ads to identify the messaging, creative, and ad copy variants that work best to improve your conversion rate.

Related Content: The Best Paid and Organic Search Channels for 2023

How Much Do Analytics Agencies Charge?

The pricing plans of analytics agencies depend on your exact project requirements.

The prices are usually set on an hourly or monthly basis and, obviously, a dedicated analytics team working 24×7 will cost you more than a team working 8 hours a day.

Most data analytics companies offer prices on request or provide custom pricing after learning about your project requirements. Therefore, the best way to inquire about the pricing of analytics service providers is to call them and request a quote after discussing your project details and goals with them.

Ready to Hire a Top Marketing Analytics Agency?

Data analytics is vital to improve the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Proven analytics insights help you revamp your Google Analytics game.

Without expert analytics agencies working on your campaign data, you are doing nothing but simply guessing and hoping to get the results.

I have listed the top data analytics service providers to help you select the best marketing agency of your choice. Be sure to compare each company’s services, prices and experience before you select one.

I hope this article will help you choose the top data analytics agency according to your exact business needs!

Schedule your FREE consultation with Single Grain’s experts to discuss your marketing analytics requirements.  👇

Book My Free Marketing Analytics Consultation

The post Best Analytics Agency: Top 8 Choices for 2023 appeared first on Single Grain.

Keep in mind that even as Google’s ranking factors continue to change, their main goal – to serve the user – does not. This is significant because even as the individual ranking factors change year after year, any SEO that is working to serve the user will ultimately be rewarded.

Take a look at some of Google’s past updates. One update that was catastrophic for many websites was when Google began to penalize content mills. It wasn’t because Google didn’t want more content; it just wanted better content that was more authoritative, unique and would ultimately be more useful to the user.

Here are the 7 ranking factors that will most efficiently move the needle for your business. As we go through this checklist, take a moment to think about how each ranking factor is creating a better user experience.

1) Brand Signals

As far back as 2008, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, said:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

And by “cesspool”, he was referring to the Internet.

I’m sure you have noticed that it is very difficult to rank above an article on Forbes or Entrepreneur even if you have a better article that is much more informative and user friendly. Why? Because they have a stronger brand.

Let’s break down some ranking factors Google considers.

Direct Website Traffic

One way that Google can tell if you are a credible brand is by looking at the amount of direct website traffic you get.

Direct traffic comes from users typing in your exact website URL or accessing your site from a bookmark. Direct traffic is important, since it significantly impacts the top 10 positions on Google.

When looking at Google Analytics for your site, direct traffic will look like this:

In a way, direct traffic signals that users know your brand and visit your site often to find information, products, services or to log in to a member portal. It’s an indication of trust and brand awareness by consumers.

Important Note: Direct Traffic Can Be Skewed

True direct traffic can be skewed a bit. Google Analytics will report traffic as “direct” if it has no data on how a user arrived at your site (this might be via “dark social” channels, like emails).

Employees accessing the website using the URL can also skew direct traffic, so exclude employee IP addresses from Google Analytics. This will give you a better understanding of your audience and how many actual users are returning to your site.

Check out our video 6 Ways to Exponentially Increase Traffic to Your Content:

Dive Deeper: [Case Study] The Content Sprout Method: How to Use Strategic Content Marketing to Grow Your Traffic From 0 to Millions

Brand Queries

Another way Google can distinguish a no-name website from a brand website is by looking at the number of brand queries. Here’s what a brand query for Single Grain looks like:

The more times that people type in the name of your business, the stronger the brand is in Google’s eyes.

In fact, a study done by Moz showed that having a large number of brand queries is even more important than DA or links:

Dive Deeper: Targeting Branded vs. SEO Keywords: Which Should You Focus On?

Social Signals

Finally, while Google doesn’t actually count social interaction as a direct ranking factor, it does play into branding and thus there is a direct correlation between social sharing and higher rankings.

Social signals are very relevant to SEO, so make sure that you take advantage of them:

Source

Think about all the credible brands you know and trust. They all have social profiles and social proof around the web, so you should also have an active account on any of the following social platforms:

User Experience

One of the best ways to elevate your brand is to offer a powerful user experience. Users are more apt to revisit a site that is easy to navigate and answers their questions in an easily digestible way.

Not only does user experience elevate the brand quality, but it also translates directly into revenue. Design Advisor claims that for every $1 invested in UX, you will get a $2-$100 ROI.

Dive Deeper:

• How Poor Website Security Negatively Impacts SEO Rankings
• 12 Reasons Your SEO Strategy Is Failing
• How to Design the UX of a Website or App to Increase Conversions

2) Dwell Time

Once you get your audience to visit your site, you need to keep them around for as long as possible. If Google sees that people aren’t spending much time on your website, they will think your result isn’t useful:

We include dwell time on here as a major ranking factor, though it is only relevant if your page already ranks within the top ten.

Technically, Google does not claim that dwell time is a ranking factor, though they have stated that they are using machine learning to determine what the best results for the user are. One of the ways that Google does this is by determining how much time is spent on a website prior to clicking back on the SERP page, so dwell time is still very important to SEO.

It’s important to note that dwell time, bounce rate and time on site are all very different metrics.

Bounce Rate: A user clicks a website link on the SERPs but does not visit any other pages on that site. Note that even if the user stayed on that page for two hours before closing the window, if they did not click on any other page, it is still considered a bounce.

Time on Site: This is the amount of time spent on any page on a site before clicking away. Note that both bounce rate and time on page/site can be tracked in Google Analytics:

Dwell Time: Dwell time is simply the total time a user spends on your site prior to returning to the SERPs.

Why is dwell time important? Google wants to know that the content and information on the page is valuable to searchers. For example, if your dwell time is less than that of your competitor’s, this signals to search engines that the content you are providing may not be fulfilling a user’s needs. This can lead to a decrease in ranking.

While dwell time does vary depending on the type of page, it might be a good opportunity to reassess any long-form content that has an average time on site of less than three minutes.

How to Improve Dwell Time

There are a few ways to increase time on site. It is a delicate balance between providing easy-to-digest content while still giving a user what they are looking for.

Tips for improving time on site include:

• An engaging introduction to keep users reading
• Breaking up large paragraphs to make content easier to read
• Lots of section headings and bullet points
• A mobile-friendly website
• Highly visual assets like images, GIFs, and videos
• Delivering answers to questions in an actionable way

For example, delivering actionable advice about keyword research in your content gives users value, which means they will stick around for a few minutes to read, learn and understand:

Once you have users on your page and engaged, provide easy site navigation to increase pages per session.

How to Decrease Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is another good indicator that your content is providing a poor experience, which will lead to a poor dwell time.

There are a few SEO hacks you can employ to decrease your bounce rate:

• Deeper Linking: Linking to relevant pages within your content can keep users engaged.
• More Relevant Pages: Develop supportive pages that can add value, like relevant product pages such as guides, manuals, reviews and case studies.
• Use Side Bars: Side bars are widgets you can employ that link to popular pages within your website.
• Engage Users Visually: Videos are a great way to improve user engagement. For instance, you can embed a video into your blog post on the same topic.
• Examine High Bounce Rate Pages: Identify pages with a high bounce rate and tweak them.

3) Website Speed

Website speed is another ranking factor that continues to be significant. This update rolled out in July of 2018 and was named the Speed Update.

As I mentioned in the beginning, Google’s goal is to serve the user the best experience possible, so if your site doesn’t load quickly, you will definitely be missing out on some rankings. But regardless of rankings, slow site speed results in a poor user experience and this is proven to have a direct impact on ROI.

Amazon did a study that showed that for every extra second it takes the website to load, they lose $1.6 million in sales – so make sure your website loads quickly!

How to Improve Website Speed

If you aren’t a very technical person, this might be something that you pass off to your web development team.

Before you do that, put your website’s URL in Page Speed Insights. This is a free tool that Google provides that will show you your current loading speed and even give you recommendations on how to make it faster:

Keep in mind, though, that this is not always 100% accurate. You can compare it with tools like GTmetrix as well. In addition, Google announced that they will be releasing a more accurate tool directly in Google Search Console.

If you want to tackle the problems yourself, here are a couple of suggestions you can do without a developer:

• Use Good Hosting: This is an easy one. If you have a WordPress website, consider using something like WPengine.
• Optimize Images: If you haven’t optimized your images yet, this should be on your to do list. Compress large images with a tool like Image Optimizer.
• Browser Caching: When you visit a webpage, your browser will store (“cache”) information from the page so that it does not have to reload the whole page again. However, this will eventually slow down the site. To avoid this, just set the “expires” header for how long you want the information to be cached.

Dive Deeper: Overlooked SEO: Optimizing Images and Video For Search

4) Domain Authority

There’s no way around this one. As brands become more and more popular, it only makes sense that Google will care about the authority of a website’s domain.

It’s very unlikely that you will find a keyword with a high keyword difficulty score showing results to low DA pages. Look at the SERPs for SEO:

They all have DAs over 85.

Think about your biggest competitors. The ones that are always ranking above you no matter how much better your content is probably have a higher domain authority.

Dive Deeper: Starting From the Bottom: How to Build Up Your Domain Authority from Scratch

How to Improve Domain Authority

Improving domain authority isn’t a quick fix. However, if you’re in it for the long game, there is still hope. Here are a few things you can do to raise your domain authority.

Build Relationships (Links)

Notice how I don’t just suggest building links. Sure, everything I’m about to say next will eventually equate to links, but focusing on the relationship rather than the link will help you scale faster. Take the time to actually get to know not only other people in the space, but also your customers. They can really be your biggest advocates, especially if they have blogs, podcasts or video channels.

Connecting with influencers is another great way to get people to engage with your brand as well as earn those valuable backlinks almost effortlessly. You may even consider hiring a PR team for this.

Provide Value (Amazing Content)

Content is no longer king. Quality content is now king. We’ve all heard it. However, what happens when there are already over a billion blogs available and every single one of them has content? Google picks the content that is the most valuable to the reader. Nobody is going to give you a gold star just for producing another piece of content that says the same thing all the other blogs say. Consider writing 10x content using Brian Dean’s Skyscraper technique.

Set Expectations

That’s right. It might not seem like a tactic that will directly increase your DA, but if you tell your boss/clients that this will take months and years, you will be saving yourself a lot of headaches down the road. It is true that the age of a site does play into its SEO rankings, so sometimes you will just have to wait it out. Keep providing amazing value and you will be fine.

Dive Deeper:

• How to Sustainably Build Quality Links by Building Relationships
• Influencer Marketing for SEO: How to Build Links with Influencer Outreach
• The Skyscraper Technique: How to Build High-Quality Backlinks to Your Content
• SEO: How to Help Your Client Understand that Ranking Takes Time

5) Backlinks

The number of backlinks that point to your site continues to be an important ranking factor. For instance, the top link in Google’s search results has double the referring domains as the content in position 10.

A recent study with Moz confirms this:

As Moz writer Eric Enge says:

“This correlation score comes in at a solid 0.293 score. Considering the complexity of the Google algorithm’s 200+ ranking factors, having one single factor come in at a correlation score that high indicates a strong level of correlation.”

Referring Domain vs. Backlinks

In Ahref’s recent study, referring domains are very strongly correlated with more organic keyword rankings:

A referring domain is simply the number of websites that are essentially vouching for the quality of your website, specific content on your site or the products and services you offer.

It’s sort of like having a network of friends. In the “real world,” people with a large network of experts, like CEOs at major companies, are usually great sources of information.

Google can look at your website’s network by analyzing the other sites that mention and link out to you. If each referring domain is the equivalent of a friend, Google sees the most authoritative person (or, in this analogy, website) as the one with the most friends/biggest network (in this case referring domains).

Dive Deeper: 4 Ways to Signal to Google that You’re an Expert Content Creator

You can have multiple backlinks from one referring domain, but they should both grow in a somewhat linear fashion, although you won’t necessarily get the same ratio of backlinks to referring domains every time. This is a pretty healthy example of growth:

Ideally, you need a mixture of referring domains pointing to your site, including high- and medium-authority sites.

Once you have one backlink from a domain, do you need any more? Do multiple backlinks from the same domain help? Multiple backlinks from a referring domain do help, though there are diminishing returns for each additional backlink from the same domain.

A good way to leverage this is to request additional backlinks to go to specific product pages or content pieces as it will still strengthen individual pages considerably:

How to Increase the Number of Referring Domains

Getting more referring domains works into your SEO link-building strategy and one of the best ways to build your link portfolio is to create high-quality content that is shareable. Here’s how:

• Broken-Link Building: Using this strategy, you hunt down broken links on other sites’ content with the intent of replacing it with your own. You can use the Google Chrome plugin Check My Links to identify broken links and then send outreach emails pitching your link as a replacement.
• Find Relevant Resource Pages: One of the easiest ways to earn backlinks is to find relevant resource pages you can get your website listed on. Find resource pages by typing in “Keyword” + “helpful resources” or “keyword”+ “useful links” into Google’s search bar. Identify the most relevant and send outreach emails.
• Brand Mentions: You may be surprised how many websites mention your brand without linking back to you. Using BuzzSumo, you can identify shares of your content and ask for a backlink.
• Influencer Marketing Campaign: For websites that offer products and services, you can employ an influencer marketing campaign to grow your number of referring domains. Why? Influencers get more content shared! Blogger influencers can be great for this, especially if they write for high-quality publications.
• Offline Efforts: This one is often overlooked and yet it is one of the most powerful link-building tools available. Remember that behind a blog are real people who have a real network of friends and colleagues. If a close friend asked you to share a quality article, you’d probably be happy to do it for free. Take time by going to conferences, having coffee meetings and other personal interactions to establish that friendship.

One of the best ways to earn more backlinks is to combine your link-building strategy with your content marketing campaigns. By producing high-quality and highly shareable content, natural links simply come without effort.

Other ways to combine your link-building efforts with your content marketing strategy include:

• Visual Content (infographics, charts and graphs, videos)
• Definitive/Ultimate Guides (like this one for YouTube SEO)
• Original Research Posts (data you have compiled)

Developing quality content is essential to your link-building efforts because content is an important ranking factor.

Dive Deeper:

• 5 Painless Ways to Build Premium Backlinks and Boost Rankings [podcast]
• How – And Why – To Build A Backlink Portfolio
• How to Squeeze the Most Value Out of Nofollow Backlinks from High-Authority Sites
• The Easy Guide to Broken Link Building for SEO

Check out our video called Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Getting Started with Blogs and Articles:

6) Secure Site

Building a website used to be a complicated process reserved for those who had deep knowledge of coding. So it wasn’t uncommon to come across a website that wasn’t secure – and even today, many sites are still not secure.

What do I mean by secure? Check out this URL:

Secure sites have an https:// rather than just an http:// (the “S” stands for “secure”).

Google now makes it very easy to spot whether a site is secure or not by putting a green padlock and the word “secure” in the address bar. Clicking on the green lock will give you more information about the site’s security:

Here’s an example of a site that is not secure:

As of August 2014, Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking signal, so I had to look on the ninth page to find an example of a site that’s not secure!

Dive Deeper: How Poor Website Security Negatively Impacts SEO Rankings

How to Secure Your Website

First of all, what does it mean to have a secure site? Having an https:// simply means that your site has an SSL certificate. (SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and, in short, it’s the standard technology for keeping an internet connection secure.)

If you have a developer, you can send this to them. If not, don’t worry, because it’s not too hard (read our guide on switching from HTTP to HTTPS here).

Here’s the short version of how to acquire an SSL certificate:

• Host with a dedicated IP address
• Buy the SSL certificate
• Verify and validate your new certificate
• Install your SSL certificate
• Redirect the HTTP version to the secure HTTPS version

7) Content Development

In many ways, the ranking factors that matter the most hinge on content development. From increasing direct traffic to increasing user interaction with your site, creating high-quality content is key.

Keep these requirements for powerful content that increases ranking in mind:

Content Length

While content length isn’t necessarily a set ranking factor, there is a direct correlation between longer content and higher rankings.

The key here is to create long-form content, not long-winded content. A study done by Neil Patel reconfirms that higher-ranking results are usually longer:

Instead of filling up the page with fluff, use the skyscraper technique to write above and beyond basic, “been there, done that” content by using case studies, actionable tips and unique perspectives.

Dive Deeper: Do You Really Need to Write 1,890-Word Blog Posts to Rank on Page 1?

Use Bullet Points

Another important ranking factor to consider when it comes to content is lists (i.e. bullet points). This plays into the user experience, as bullet points make the page easier to skim and also usually increases dwell time.

Brian Dean of Backlinko shared his site’s average time on page for a piece of content that was nearly a whopping 7 minutes!!

And when you click on the post, you’ll see that there are a lot of lists, images and bolded headlines, which make it easy for a reader to stick around:

This explains why the average time on that page is so high.

Promotion

After you’ve created your amazing piece of long-form content, you aren’t done. This is where the real work begins. You need to make sure that you are promoting your blog posts properly, such as on:

• Social Channels: Promote your content through Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, or any other site that is relevant to your business.
• Medium: Medium is a widely overlooked channel for promotion. Post the first couple of paragraphs and then link back to your website to increase your traffic.
• Link-Building Outreach: Don’t spam your post to thousands of people, but do push it out to the people or companies to which you linked in your post. Those people will probably be delighted that you linked to them and may help share the content.
• Paid Ads: If you don’t have a huge audience yet, consider running paid social ads because if people don’t know who you are, the easiest way to find them and target them by their exact interests is to use the filters in social platforms. For example, Facebook Ads are really good with targeting.
• Influencers in Your Space: If you link out to any influencers within your blog post, email each of them and say something like: “Hey [NAME]. I just want to let you know I’m a huge fan of your work, so much so that I even linked out to you in my latest blog post [ARTICLE NAME/LINK]. Thanks!” It’s that simple.

Dive Deeper: Why Content Marketing Should Always Be 20% Creation and 80% Promotion

Omnichannel

Going omnichannel is perhaps one of the biggest focuses of late and will have a huge impact on your rankings and brand. You used to be able to build a brand with just an amazing blog, but that isn’t the case anymore.

If you want to compete in this ever-more-competitive marketplace, you have to have your content on multiple platforms.

How do you do that? You don’t have to produce a million pieces of different content. Consider using our content sprout technique and start with just one piece of content. It could be a blog post that you then turn into a video, which can become a podcast which can become an infographic, etc.

Dive Deeper: Omnichannel Marketing: Using the Content Sprout Method to Overcome Info Overload

Bonus: Recovering from Penalties

If you wake up one day and see a huge drop in traffic, it can only mean one thing: You have been penalized by Google:

So what can you do to recover from a Google penalty?

First thing, go to your Google Search Console. It will give you a message if there was a manual penalty.

If they have given you a manual penalty, simply correct what they have penalized you for. Then you can submit a manual actions report.

If it wasn’t a manual penalty, a lot of other people were probably affected as well. Check out some of the search publications, like Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Roundtable to see if they posted anything about a major algorithm update.

Most people got hit by the Panda and Penguin updates. Agile Media posted a case study about a site that had been hit with the Penguin penalty:

They had a client that had a number of spammy links, so when they saw the traffic drop, they made a list of all the websites that were spammy and asked to have the links removed. They filed a reconsideration request and the penalty was lifted within 7 days.

If you don’t notice any major uproar from the SEO world, track your revenue closely. Are you actually losing any revenue? Google might have been sending irrelevant visitors to your site and they might have been accounting for a large portion of your traffic, but none of them were converting. This is actually good news because your bounce rate will go down and your time on page will go up, which automatically increases the quality of your SEO.

Brian Dean once published a post How to Get High-Quality Backlinks. It was very high quality and therefore ranked for a lot of keywords, including “how to get high”. As you can imagine, this post was not serving the searcher intent, so Google slowly began to drop it in rankings for that keyword. As a result, the bounce rate decreased and the time on page increased.

Dive Deeper: How to Recover From Any Google Penalty

In Conclusion

Ranking factors will continue to change, but for now these are the most important ranking factors. Each of the factors included here point towards creating a better answer for the user, which is an evergreen goal that Google has.

By improving on the above top-ranking factors, you can serve up quality content, improve key analytics, boost traffic, and build a robust link portfolio. In many ways, by improving just one or two of these points, the others will also improve. Like many things about SEO, the correlation between ranking factors are indeed powerful.

The post The 7 Most Important Ranking Factors appeared first on Single Grain.

But, due to the tremendous popularity of Google Analytics, we often overlook the presence of other analytics tools that are just as good.

Maybe you want to ditch GA because of issues related to data privacy (Google tracks your data to use it for advertising purposes). Or you’ve realized that GA data is often based on a percentage of your overall data, meaning that it does not report all of it (this is called data sampling). Or you just want to see what else is out there and whether it can show you anything different about your business.

Whatever the reason, if you are looking for an alternative to Google Analytics, here are the 9 best analytics platforms that you might want to consider.

1) GoSquared

GoSquared is simple and easy to use web analytics platform with beautiful, intuitive dashboards. You only need to install GoSquared on your website – no further setup is required. It offers easy integrations with several platforms like Twitter, Slack, Zapier, Shopify, WordPress, Joomla and others.

Top Features

This web analytics tool offers different dashboards for each purpose. The various types of dashboards offered by GoSquared are:

• Now Dashboard – This is a real-time web analytics dashboard that lets you see what’s happening on your website right now. You can see the number of concurrent visitors and compare it with a previous time frame. You can discover the top traffic sources in real time and identify the top pages on your site:

• Trends Dashboard – This dashboard has a built-in historical reporting feature that answers the question “What happened on your site on any given day, week, month or year?” It also displays the IP address of your visitors to give you extra information that most analytics tools don’t offer:

• E-commerce Analytics Dashboard – This is one of the newest forms of dashboard that is extremely useful for e-commerce site owners. It lets you answer the question: “What happened on your e-commerce site on any given day, week, month or year?”:

Price

For smaller websites that get less than 1,000 page views per month, this tool is free to use. For page views above 100,000 each month, there is a charge of $29/month. Charges increase depending on the number of pageviews your site receives:

Why Choose GoSquared?

If you are looking for a faster real-time analytics solution for your website, then GoSquared is your best bet. There is no waiting time with GoSquared because this tool is not built around “batch processing.” Everything loads in a flash and your reports are ready to use within seconds.

Related Content:

• What Gets Measured Gets Managed: How to Use Metrics to Boost Performance
• Everything You Need to Know About B2B Performance Metrics
• How to Use Predictive Analytics for Better Marketing Performance
• How To Measure Your Content Marketing ROI With Google Analytics

2) Matomo

Matomo (formerly called Piwik) is a powerful web analytics platform that lets you take full control of your data. This platform is reliable and secure to use and provides log server analytics if required. All the guesswork related to your data is removed, leaving only 100% accurate data:

Top Features

• Every time you reach a particular limit in your Google Analytics account, the data reporting is capped, which means it then becomes a guess. This is not the case with Matomo. You get 100% accurate data every time without any limits:

• You can get the help of heatmaps, A/B testing, form analytics, white label reporting and enhanced visitor profiles to understand your data and make better business decisions.
• With the help of the visitor profile feature, you can see the exact life-time journey of an active user. You are able to see when the user returns, why the user returns, what action they take and when they prefer to purchase.
• Matomo displays the keywords that are sending traffic to your site along with ranking positions and unbiased search engine reporting.

Price

There are three packages offered by Matomo: Essential, Business and Enterprise. For a site with monthly traffic of 50,000 page views, you can start with the Essential option for $19 per month where you are able to capture data for five websites. The Business option starts at $29 per month that lets you capture data for 30 websites, and for the Enterprise option you must call them for customized pricing:

Why Choose Matomo?

This is an all-in-one premium web analytics platform where you get a whole range of features, including SEO, conversions and analytics. There is no data sampling, which means that all your data is reported 100% accurately. Last but not least, you and you alone remain the owner of your own data.

3) Heap

Heap is a new-age data analytics solution that aims to capture the complete customer dataset. The platform automatically captures every web, mobile and cloud interaction accurately:

Top Features

• Heap captures, virtualizes, identifies, connects and analyzes data for you. All this happens automatically and your dashboard presents you with a complete view of what’s happening in your website.
• The auto-capture feature automatically captures every click, form fill up and pageview. Every bit of information is captured on your website or mobile app without the need to add any extra pieces of coding.
• You are able to get data on every interaction retroactively, thereby ensuring high-quality data.
• The snapshot feature lets you codelessly capture data from a page without the need to change any code:

• You can leverage the power of product analytics to understand how users interact with your product and prioritize product enhancements.
• The form conversion overview report lets you analyze the form submission and conversion data by marketing channel so that you know which channels are generating the maximum ROI:

• Heap offers single-click integration with CRO platforms like Optimizely and VWO so that you are able to analyze the effects of A/B tests.

Price

Heap offers three price packages: Free, Startup and Enterprise. The first 5,000 sessions are free with the aptly named Free option, for up to 20K sessions each month it costs $499, and if you have more than 20K sessions each month then you need to opt for the Enterprise plan with custom pricing:

Why Choose Heap?

Heap is an easy-to-use analytics platform that collects data from the very beginning. You don’t have to define all your data points because it starts collecting info from every data point right away and you can view it all at a later stage. You can even track minute data points like the click on any specific URL of your website even if it’s contextual.

4) Clicky

This is one of the most underrated analytics tool that lets you track, monitor and analyze your traffic data in real time. It is a powerful combination of simplicity, value and competence.

Top Features

• Clicky displays visitor data from the current day (by default) so that you don’t need to filter the data every time you log in to the dashboard.
• This tool makes it easier for you to see what your visitors did when they visited your website.
• You have the power to launch heatmaps from the widget without the need to leave your site.
• You can view heatmaps by page, visitor or segment. The heatmaps display where visitors are clicking on your pages so that it becomes easier for you to optimize pages for more conversions:

• Clicky also monitors your website and sends you alerts in case your site is down or any other issue happens.
• It displays every visitor detail so that you know who your visitors are and what they do on your website:

• This is the first web analytics platform to offer real-time campaign tracking, which means that you don’t need to wait for 24 hours to start seeing the data. You will be able to know what’s happening on your website immediately.

Price

Clicky offers five pricing options, depending on how many websites you want to track or daily pageviews you get. Up to 3,000 daily pageviews is free. The pro plan starts at $9.99 and you can track 30,000 page views daily. If you want to use the heatmaps then you need to subscribe to the Pro Plus version which costs $14.99 per month. For 100K daily pageviews go with the Pro Platinum plan, and more than that (up to 20M pageviews) puts you at the Custom option with varied pricing:

Why Choose Clicky?

If you want to see high-level detail on every segment, then Clicky is the tool for you. Every single report is maintained in real time and you can see individual visitors and their actions.

The biggest advantage is that the tool automatically blocks spam bots through its advanced bot filtering feature. This means that the data you have in your dashboard is a real measure of the quality traffic your site is receiving. There is no further filtering required to eliminate spam traffic.

Related Content:

• How to Optimize Your Site for Search Ranking with Your Web Analytics Data
• How to Use Big Data Analytics to Grow Your Marketing ROI
• 9 Mission-Critical Lead Generation Metrics You Need To Track
• How to Optimize Your Content Strategy with the Buyer’s Journey

5) Woopra

Woopra is the analytics platform that lets you optimize for every touchpoint in your customer journey. It offers full funnel attribution, feature usage trends, cohort analysis and much more. It lets you easily understand what customers are doing on your website so that you can better optimize it to drive growth and customer retention.

Top Features

• Woopra analytics dashboards not only display data, but lets you find answers to questions like “How do onboarding emails impact conversions?”, “Which article topics gets the most pageviews?”, “Which channels drive maximum sign ups?” etc.
• With the help of the Journey reports, you can quickly identify customer behavior and respond to it. The report displays the journey of every unique customer visiting your site, thereby helping you drive more conversions and improved customer retention.

• The Trends report is particularly useful for e-commerce websites as they allow you to measure the performance of every product that drives long-term success and revenue. You can dig deeper to analyze data using different dimensions such as location, version, subscription type and more:

• The Cohort Analysis report will help you understand if users continue to perform actions like logging in, using product features or opening emails. You have the ability to measure the churn rate in seconds:

Price

The core version is free to use where you can track around 500K actions. The Pro version costs $999 each month and you have the option to track 5M actions each month. And the Enterprise version requires that you call for  customized pricing:

Why Choose Woopra?

Woopra lets you analyze stats in real time and displays a stream of live updates of what users are doing on your site right now. You can also track the path of every individual user so that you can optimize the customer journey.

6) MixPanel

MixPanel is trusted by over 26,000 companies, including Samsung and Expedia. It is much more than just an analytics platform: It is a complete package to build and make decisions as a product or service team. You can measure user behavior and its impact on your business goals.

Top Features

• You can quickly segment the data on the basis of time, browser, device or any other metric, and even visualize your data by comparing it with the performance of the previous year:

• You can get complete data about every user who visits your website. You are able to see what actions they take on your site and what roadblocks they encounter when trying to convert. This helps you to better optimize your website for every individual visitor:

• With the help of Cohort Analysis, you are able to compare how different groups of users behave:

Price

The Starter package is free for up to 1,000 monthly tracked users. The Growth option starts at $779 per year where the tool will track up to 25,000 monthly users. For the Enterprise pack, you need to contact MixPanel for custom pricing:

Why Choose MixPanel?

MixPanel sees everything in terms of events rather than pageviews. It tracks each and every stage of the buyer funnel with unique events. Funnels can be segmented on the basis of properties and you can run reports instantly without having to wait. If you have a conversion funnel that requires handling many events, then MixPanel is the analytics tool you should definitely use.

7) GoAccess

GoAccess is an open-source web log analyzer that displays a real-time dashboard in HTML format. This tool makes use of log file parsing (the good ol’ technique) to measure traffic coming to your site.

Top Features

• GoAccess offers both terminal and HTML interfaces and can be used as a primary tool for identifying web server issues:

• It renders data rather quickly and the HTML display of reports is impressive.
• It continuously monitors web server logs and provides real-time analytics.
• You can see a dashboard similar to this one:

It displays the number of unique visitors per day including spiders, as well as a list of not found URLs, top referrer URLs, top keyphrases from Google, country sorted by unique hits and HTTP status codes.

Price

GoAccess is a free (MIT Licensed) and open-source tool.

Why Choose GoAccess?

GoAccess offers a simple HTML report where you can see all the real-time movement of traffic. If you are looking for an alternative GA tool for tracking user data with live updates, then this is the best tool for you. The HTML reports are clean and easy to understand.

8) Open Web Analytics

OWA is another great alternative to Google Analytics. It is simple, free to use and open source. You can download and use the software to identify how people use your website or applications.

Top Features

• The main reporting dashboard mimics the appearance of Google Analytics, which makes it fairly intuitive to use if you’re already familiar with GA. You can see the number of unique visitors, page views, average visit duration, total revenue, total transactions, bounce rate, etc.

• The main report presents the top content on your site, the top referring sites, the top traffic sources and the latest visits.
• The e-commerce report displays the total revenue across all transactions sorted by date. You can also see the number of visits and the number of days that users took to purchase items from your site.
• You can track an unlimited number of websites and even use heatmaps to view the areas that receive the most clicks on your site.

Price

OWS is open source and free to use, although they do accept donations.

Why Choose Open Web Analytics?

OWS is a great Google Analytics alternative and the best part is, it mimics the appearance of GA. This makes it easier for people who have used GA to use this tool. There are some WordPress-specific features available, like tracking users by WordPress username or email address, tracking all page types by posts or archives, tracking the number of comments and tracking the number of subscribers.

Related Content:

• The 7 E-mail Marketing Metrics that Actually Matter and Why
• Creating Google Analytics Funnels and Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide
• 5 Ways to Track Your Website’s Revenue with Google Analytics
• Here’s How to Use Web Analytics to Boost Content Marketing Performance

9) Hotjar

Hotjar is a visual analytics platform that not only gives you information about site visitors, but also lets you know how visitors react when they visit your site. You are able to understand what drives them to take action and which elements on your site receive the maximum engagement.

Top Features

• This tool helps you gather qualitative data instead of quantitative data, which means that it doesn’t show you just numbers that need further processing to extract meaning. Rather, it displays the meaning of the numbers so that you can make decisions instantly.
• It provides a visual representation of visitor clicks. With the help of heatmaps you are able to see the exact elements on your site that are liked by visitors the most.
• Hotjar lets you analyze user behavior with the help of different types of heatmaps like Click Heatmaps, Scroll Heatmaps, Move Heatmaps and Download and Share Heatmaps:

• The best feature of Hotjar that I like the most is visitor recording. You are able to see a video of how a user interacts with your website, like which pages they visit, what information they read, which links they click on, etc. This is a great way to understand user behavior and optimize your site accordingly:

• Hotjar shows you categorized information on heatmaps. Visits received via desktop, tablet or mobile are shown separately, so that you know the difference in user behavior coming from mobile vs desktop:

• You can get user opinions in the form of surveys and make changes to your site accordingly.
• With the help of properly defined conversion funnel reports, you are able to answer the question “Why are your visitors dropping off?”  You can also watch recordings of drop-offs so that you can fix the issue immediately:

• You can perform A/B testing pretty easily and it provides support in over 20 languages.

Price

Hotjar offers different plans – Personal, Business and Agency – depending on the pageviews your site receives. For up to 20,000 pageviews per day, it costs $89 a month. For 50,000 pageviews per day, you will have to pay $189 a month. For 120,000 pageviews a day, the price rises to $289 a month. The price further increases with an increase in the number of pageviews:

Why Choose Hotjar?

You don’t need to be an expert to start using Hotjar, as it’s pretty easy to use. The visitor recording feature lets you see the real user behavior on your site, which is something you don’t find in any other analytics tool. You can replay sessions of visitors, tag recordings or share the recording with your team.

If you are struggling with conversions on your site, then Hotjar is definitely the tool to opt for. It offers a combination of analytics plus a feedback suite so that you don’t need to spend time or money on multiple platforms to improve conversions on your site.

Final Thoughts

Analytics platforms are absolutely essential for online business owners. Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most preferred choice but there are other good alternatives that you might choose in conjunction with or in place of GA.

The GA alternatives discussed in this article offer you unsampled data and are much cheaper to use when compared to Google Analytics Premium. Start using these and get complete ownership over your website data!

The post 9 Alternatives that Are Just as Good as Google Analytics appeared first on Single Grain.

If you answered “yes” to the above questions, then the problem could be “quality traffic”. Read on to find out how to tell if the traffic coming to your website is of poor quality, and if so, how to fix it.

How to Know if Your Website’s Traffic Quality Is Poor

Here are some ways to easily identify whether or not your website is acquiring the traffic that it deserves:

1) Your Bounce Rate Is Higher than the Industry Average

As per Google, “a bounce is a single-page session” and the “bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.” In other words, a site visitor is said to bounce when they visit a web page but then do nothing else.

If the industry average is 60% but the bounce rate of your website is 80%, then it is a signal that your traffic quality is poor. The below graph provided by Conversion XL shows the bounce rate benchmarks by industry:

To lower your bounce rate, you will have to analyze what is going on in your Google Analytics or other web analytics tool to figure out why people are leaving your site so quickly.

2) Your Average Website Session Duration Is Less than 2-3 Minutes

According to research from Databox, around 41% of websites have an average session duration of 2-3 minutes:

Another 55% reported an average session duration of less than 3 minutes and 27% reported more than 4 minutes.

Databox further shows that the best tactic to increase average session duration is to include visuals – such as relevant videos, charts and infographics – on your page to hold your visitors’ attention.

3) Your Percentage of Returning Visitors Is Less than 30%

As per Mike Sullivan, top contributor to the Google Analytics support forum, the percentage of returning visitors to your site should be around 30%. Anything less than that is below average, while having it around 50% is considered to be good.

When you get new visitors to your website, some of them will “stick” (return), so you should always be drawing in new visitors – and Sullivan says that 50%-70% is a good range.

Most websites get more new visitors than returning visitors, but it’s the latter that have higher engagement — “they bounce less, view more pages per session, and have higher session durations. They also tend to have higher conversion rates and higher sales.”:

How to Improve the Quality of Traffic on Your Website

Now that you know what to look for when determining the quality of your website traffic, here are the top 8 ways to improve the quality of traffic on your site:

1) Target High-Intent Keywords

Depending on your business goals, you must target high-intent keywords that are commercial in nature.

As WordStream suggests, a search query can be divided into three types: navigational, informational and transactional:

Out of these three search types, only transactional queries have high commercial intent resulting in a sale.

PPC ads around commercial intent keywords can result in good ROI. However, the definition of transactional keywords differs from one business to another. Commercial-intent keywords can be classified into two categories:

• buy now keywords
• product keywords

“Buy now” keywords signify that the user has already decided to purchase the product, and examples of these keywords include:

• Buy
• Discount(s)
• Deal(s)
• Coupon(s)
• Free shipping

Unlike prospects searching for “buy now” keywords, people using “product” keywords might be a little hesitant to purchase the product immediately, but they also have a high conversion rate. Examples of “product” keywords include:

• Brand-name goods
• Specific products
• Product categories
• Affordable
• Best
• Cheapest
• Comparison
• Review

If the main purpose of your website is to generate sales, then prepare a list of high-commercial-intent keywords and rank your website for those keywords both in organic and paid search results.

Please note: It is still important to target informational and navigational search queries in your digital marketing strategy, although the maximum weightage should be given to high-commercial-intent keywords. Informational and navigation searches only push the customer deeper into the sales funnel but actual conversion happens through commercial searches. Hence, if your website isn’t ranking for high-commercial-intent searches, then traffic will come to your site but visitors won’t take any action.

2) Regularly Monitor Your Traffic Quality Level

Traffic quality level is a metric that monitors the overall traffic quality of a website. Analytics tools such as Finteza lets you analyze the traffic quality level by comparing the type of traffic your website receives on a regular basis.

Once you’ve logged in to Finteza, navigate to the Quality tab located in the left-hand sidebar where you’ll see a donut chart comparing the traffic statistics over a selected period:

The information is grouped on the basis of color for easier viewing:

• Green indicates real traffic
• Red indicates traffic from spam IP addresses
• Yellow indicates traffic from VPN and proxy servers
• Gray indicates traffic from social networks and search engine bots

The best part about Finteza is that it will alert you if there is any possibility of an external attack. You will notice a sharp increase in “Attackers: SSH, Brute-force, DDoS” column, where it will provide the reason the increase. This usually happens when there is an unexpected traffic increase on a website. You can then take steps to protect your website from unwanted traffic.

3) Send Emails that Speak to Your Customers’ Interests

The highest quality of traffic are the visits from your existing customers. And there is no better way than email marketing to enable them to visit your site more often. The idea is to send emails that speak to your customers’ interests.

According to DMA, a campaign that is segmented can improve revenue by 760%:

Source

The best way to segment your list is by capturing data about your visitors in a sign-up form. Instead of sending a sales-oriented email, share tricks with them regarding how they can solve their pain points. This will make them read your emails further and take the required action (following a link) by visiting your website. Keep emails short to pique curiosity in the minds of the readers.

Here are the most important things to keep in mind while doing passion-based email marketing:

• Always create a subscription-based email list, because if you start sending emails to people who haven’t subscribed, you are wasting your time as well as your reader’s time.
• Segment your contacts based on their interests. The simplest way to do this is by asking your users about their interests. Have a look at the below email-subscription form sent by Robert Paul properties in which people are able to choose the type of listing they would like to receive and never receive an email that isn’t relevant to them:

• Gamify your emails for readers who are too slow to take action. Yes, there are people who like to visit your website and would like to take action, but they never seem to get around to it. For such users, a gentle push is necessary and gamification is an awesome way to do that. Have a look at the below “Bestseller Bingo” email sent by Penguin Random House to its subscribers:

Dive Deeper:

• Segmentation 101: A Strategist’s Complete Guide to Marketing Segmentation
• 7 Segmentation Mistakes That Are Costing Your Business Money
• Hacking Email Marketing: 14 Tactics that Work [Infographic]
• How to Use Personalization to Increase the Impact of Email Marketing

4) Leverage the Power of Retargeting

According to Retargeter, only 2% of traffic converts on the first visit. This means that you need to follow up with the prospects in order to convert them.

Retargeting is a great way to connect with prospects who are already in the middle stage of the sales funnel. Most businesses make the mistake of spending heavily on content marketing, email marketing, PPC ads and SEO, but never take remarketing seriously. Remarketing is the best way to acquire quality traffic.

No matter which channel you are using to acquire traffic to your website, always invest in retargeting because it’s a surefire way to bring interested visitors back to your website:

Depending on how likely your visitors are to convert, they can be divided into three stages: cold, warm and hot traffic.

• Cold Traffic: People who have never engaged with your content before visiting your website are classified as cold traffic. Though it is very difficult to convert them at this stage, you can use their email address for remarketing through Google Ads.
• Warm Traffic: The people who have shown some interest in your product but are still searching for products or services to find solutions to their problems are classified as warm traffic. You can use the carousel ad format to display the product that they’ve clicked on your site to retarget them.
• Hot Traffic: People actively looking to purchase the product and are coming to their final decision are considered hot traffic.

Source

Dive Deeper:

• Retargeting 101: Why It’s Essential for Any Marketing Funnel
• The Difference Between Retargeting and Remarketing
• How to Get 1,000 True Fans with Facebook Video Retargeting

5) Use Influencer Marketing to Boost Awareness of Your Product or Service

There are various types of influencer campaigns you can run. Affiliate marketing is a type of campaign where you compensate influencers who get sales for you by tracking ROI through custom URLs and unique discount codes.

The best way to drive engagement and get great brand exposure is by running contests and giveaways. Depending on your product’s price point, you can give away a handful of products each month to the winners.

People trust influencers and if they say they have started using your product and it is really good, the audience who has never heard about your brand will be encouraged to give it a try. Set a goal and document your key performance indicators (KPIs) while building your influencer strategy.

Dive Deeper:

• The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with Influencer Marketing
• How to Boost Your Website Traffic with a Giveaway

6) Improve Your Ad Quality Score

Google rates the quality of your ad, keywords and landing pages. The higher your ad Quality Score, the better your ad will perform. It also means that it will lead to cheaper clicks.

The ad Quality Score depends on factors such as click-through rates (CTR), the relevance of each keyword, and landing page quality. The past performance of your Google Ads campaign also might affect your ad Quality Score.

Ads with a good Quality Score get higher rankings (without increasing the bid), and if your PPC ads meet customers’ needs, your ad score will increase:

You can achieve a higher ad Quality Score by improving your ad text, optimizing the landing pages and removing negative keywords. Research continuously for relevant keywords and divide them into individual Ad Groups and campaigns.

In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your cost per conversion (CPC). As WordStream puts it, a high Quality Score is Google’s way of saying that your PPC ad meets your potential customers’ needs:

The higher that your ad ranks, the higher your traffic will be. PPC campaigns are costly, especially if you don’t have a good quality score. Focus on keywords to optimize your ad.

Please note: Sometimes Google might suspend your site from being displayed in the ads section due to suspected malware. It is best to keep a backup of your website in case of such circumstances. Constant interruptions in your traffic flow might also degrade the quality of traffic that your site is getting, hence data backup is highly recommended.  

Dive Deeper:

• The Ultimate Guide to Creating a High-Converting Landing Page in 2019
• SEO Keyword Research Made Easy in 2019
• How to Lower the Cost of Google Ads and Get Better Conversions

7) Use Native Advertising to Your Advantage

Paid advertising made to look like it is a part of the content on the page is referred to as native advertising. According to ClickZ, native advertising earns 3X more time and attention and performs 10X better than traditional mobile ads.

Native advertising can overcome banner blindness and reach your target audience, and, if used correctly, it can drive high-quality traffic to your website:

They work better than any other ads because they don’t look like ads and fit naturally within the content. Native advertisements have the potential to increase your brand awareness better than any other type of ads because they have the ability to attract more attention from your readers. Another advantage of native advertising is it can pass ad blockers.

When placed in the right context, native ads can generate higher click-through rates. Focusing on native advertising can help you drive more traffic to your website, hence generating more revenue.

There are various native advertising formats such as in-feed native ad units, search and promoted listings, content recommendation widgets, custom content units, and in-game native ads.

8) Drop Under-Performing Channels

Have you ever wondered if dropping an underperforming channel could make a huge impact on your overall conversion rate? Take these numbers as an example:

• SEO provides a conversion rate of 15%
• PPC gives you a conversion rate of 10%
• Social media conversion rates are around 20%
• Email marketing conversions are about 4%

Out of these, the underperforming channel is clearly email marketing with a conversion rate of 4%. This means that traffic generated via email marketing isn’t converting. If we drop this channel, then we can easily improve the quality of traffic on our website and improve conversion rates.

Final Thoughts

It’s not about the number of visitors you get on your website, it’s about how much high-quality traffic your website gets. Choose the source that brings you closer to your business goals. Understanding what your customers want and optimizing your strategy accordingly can help you drive high-quality traffic to your website.

The post How to Know if Your Website’s Traffic Quality Is Poor (And How to Fix It!) appeared first on Single Grain.

Why?

Because it’s really damn hard. Content is nebulous. Sometimes a person will read a single article and immediately buy. Other times it takes 10 articles before someone’s ready to open their wallet. How can you track that?

Well, you can’t. At least not 100% accurately.

But you can get a rough estimate. And that’s far better than not measuring anything at all! If you know approximately how much traffic, leads and sales your articles are generating, you can use that data to continuously improve your marketing and plan your content strategy.

This guide will teach you how to measure your content marketing ROI using Google Analytics, step by step. But before that, there are some important things you should know.

Important Points Before You Begin

Content marketing has a lot of returns beyond direct leads or sales.

For example, having great content on your site can improve your customer retention which, in turn, increases your customer lifetime value. Plus, you could score links from top-tier publications who pick up on your research.

Great content can also help with brand awareness – just look at content marketing experts like Buffer, Neil Patel or HubSpot. Almost everyone in the marketing community knows these names because of the content they produce. How can you measure that kind of return?

Remember, your ROI is almost always higher than the value you’ll find by going through this process (because not everything is trackable).

Before you get started, I’m making a few assumptions…

• You have Google Analytics and goal tracking set up properly.
• You know how much an email subscriber is worth to you.

To get a decent estimate of content marketing ROI, you have to know how many email subscribers you get from your content and what those subscribers are worth.
Click To Tweet

To figure that out, you need two equations.

First, take your total number of subscribers (# Subs), multiply that by your conversion rate (CVR) and multiply that by your Average Order Value (AOV) to find your total profit from your list:

# Subs (CRV) (AOV) = Total Profit

Then, divide your profit by your total number of subscribers to find the value of a single email subscriber:

Profit ÷ # Subs = Value of an Email Subscriber

For example, if I get one sale for every 10 subscribers (10% conversion rate) and the average order value from that sale is $10, then every subscriber I get is worth roughly $1.

10 subs (0.1) ($10) = $10 profit

$10 profit ÷ 10 subs = $1 per lead

That’s all there is to it! Now, let’s move on to Google Analytics.

5 Steps to Measure Content Marketing ROI via Goal Conversions

Head over to your Analytics account and follow along.

Step 1: Determine Your Costs

To know your return, you have to know how much you’ve spent. This step is simple – just add up all the costs of creating, promoting, and building links to your content.

For example, if I hired a writer to create an article and it cost me $500, and I also spent $200 on paid promotion for that article, I’d be at $700 cost per article.

If I then spend two hours on email outreach to further promote and build links to that article, that’s a cost, too. To determine a dollar amount, simply multiply your billable rate by the number of hours you spent promoting the article. So, if you bill $150 per hour, you just added $300 to the cost of that article, for a total of $1,000.

Further Reading:

• The Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
• Creating Google Analytics Funnels and Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide
• The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Content

Step 2: Download Your Reverse Goal Path Data

Now we’re getting into Google Analytics. Go to Conversions » Goals » Reverse Goal Path.

Now, once you’ve got your reverse goal path data, export it to a CSV file by clicking the “Export” button at the top of the page. We’re going to put it in a Google Sheet along with your page view data, which you’ll retrieve in Step 3 below.

Step 3: Download Your Page View Data

Next, go to Behavior » Site Content » All Pages.

Filter your content to only show blog posts by typing “/blog” in the search bar. If you don’t have “/blog” in your blog post URLs, you’ll need to filter through them manually. Download this data into a CSV file just like you did in Step 2.

Step 4: Calculate Your Conversion Rate & Profit

Finally, take the two CSV files you’ve downloaded and merge them into a single Google Sheet. Create four columns:

• Post
• Unique Views
• Subscribers
• Conversion Rate

NOTE: If you’re using form fills or another action as your Google Analytics Goal conversions, change the name of that column to reflect this. For example, this column could say “Leads” or “Form Fills”.

Next, divide column C (Subscribers) by Column B (Unique Views) and multiply it by 100 to get your Conversion Rate (Column D). When you’re done, it should look like this:

You can now see which articles on your site are giving you the highest return in terms of goal conversions. But we’re not done yet!

PRO TIP: If you have a very low conversion rate, your landing page could be the culprit. Consider improving your product page design to increase conversions and squeeze more profits from your content marketing efforts.

Further Reading:

• 5 Ways to Track Your Website’s Revenue with Google Analytics
• How to Use Predictive Analytics for Better Marketing Performance
• How to Use Big Data Analytics to Grow Your Marketing ROI

Step 5: Calculate Your ROI

Add a fifth column to your Google Sheet titled “Profit”. Multiply column C (Subscribers) by your unique subscriber value calculated in the first section of this guide.

Using the $1 example we calculated, here’s what mine would look like:

Now you can see the direct profit from each article for the given time frame! If you want to see for a full year, change the data in Analytics to reflect that and re-do this process. You can even create a separate sheet for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly return.

But this is still just profit. What about return? For that, we’ll have to create two additional columns:

• Cost
• ROI

The cost column is the total cost of the article, including creation, promotion, and link building. The ROI column is the profit column minus the cost column. Here’s what that looks like:

Boom! You now have exact dollar amounts to measure your content marketing ROI with Google Analytics and a spreadsheet.

But that’s just ROI from your email subscribers (or whatever goal conversions you’ve set up) based on averages. What about direct sales?

Calculating ROI From Content Marketing Via Direct Sales

For this section, you need to have e-commerce goal tracking turned on and set up. If that’s set up properly, you should be able to see your page value from each page on your site by going to Behavior » Site Content » All Pages just like we did in Step 3 above.

However, this only tracks sales for single sessions. As I said above, not everyone will visit a single article and immediately buy. Some will come back again and again before finally making a purchase from you.

That’s where Assisted Conversions come in.

Assisted Conversions measure the number of conversions that a channel (such as paid ads or organic search) assisted with, at any point along the customer’s journey.

To see Assisted Conversions, go to Conversions » Multi-Channel Funnels » Assisted Conversions. Click on a channel and look at the Lead or Click Direct Conversion Value column to see how much money a post has made via direct and indirect sources.

You can dive into these reports to see which channels are driving the most sales. For example, if Pinterest tends to be the biggest assistor to your content, spend more time getting into high-quality Pinterest groups.

Or, if Google is your biggest revenue driver, put your efforts behind improving your SEO and guest posting. You get the idea.

Further Reading:

• How to Run A/B Tests that Actually Increase Conversions
• The 10 Most Powerful SEO Tactics for 2018
• How to Implement a Cost-Effective SEO Strategy in 4 Steps

Bonus Tip For More Accurate Tracking & More Sales

For content marketing to be truly effective, at least some (if not most) of your articles need to be purely informational to teach your readers something. That means not all of your articles will directly promote your products/services.

But you can still translate these visitors directly into leads/sales!

The key is native advertising – ads for your products or services that fit seamlessly into your content, typically in the form of in-line ads with a CTA.

For example, Neil Patel puts customer testimonials in the middle of his articles with a button to contact him and help grow your company:

You can also do this for e-commerce products. For example, we interviewed 20 camping experts to figure out their favorite camping gear. In between their answers, we created standout boxes to advertise our new travel-related T-shirts:

By adding native ads like these, you can see exactly which articles are converting into sales (and how much money they’re making you) with a simple goal funnel. To see the results from this, you have two options:

• Create a unique goal conversion in Google Analytics for these native ads, then create a goal funnel that goes from the native ad button through to the sale. From there, you’ll be able to see which articles drove the most goal conversions via that funnel under the Conversions » Goals » Goal Flow section.
• Use a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg to see which articles receive the most clicks on a particular native ad. This method is easier to implement, but less accurate (since it doesn’t factor in actual conversions).

You can also run A/B tests on your native ads to further improve your click-through rate. Yes, there’s always more to be done!

Transforming Your Content Marketing Strategy

Armed with this knowledge, you now have a way to measure your content marketing ROI in a concrete dollar amount.

While this method isn’t 100% accurate, it is very simple and easy to implement. And you can use this data to:

• Determine which articles to spend more money or time promoting.
• Create more of the articles/topics that tend to drive the most revenue.
• Stop wasting time on content that simply isn’t performing.

Whether you’re an e-commerce store owner or you provide a service, tracking your content marketing efforts is an easy way to get more sales. So get to it!

The post How to Measure Your Content Marketing ROI with Google Analytics appeared first on Single Grain.

Ideas to mitigate such failure may be hidden in your web analytics reports. I love analyzing my site to find specific answers to the issues on organic traffic. If you are using a tool such as Google Analytics to understand your website, you have access to ample data in order to improve your organic traffic.

Let’s take a look at several ways in which you can use Google Analytics to improve your organic reach.

Page Speed

Speed has become one of the most important search ranking factors, especially after the advent of mobile-first indexing by Google. You can assess your site’s loading time through various online tools, such as Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix.

But in order to find the loading times of specific web pages on your site, you need to get into Google Analytics. The GA page speed report is based on actual data generated from visitors accessing your web pages. Find the report under Behavior > Site Speed > Speed Suggestions.

The above report belongs to a rather poorly optimized website. The average loading time was around 35 seconds for every page.

The recommended page loading time today for most websites is less than 3 seconds.
Click To Tweet

The Page Speed Suggestions report will tell you which pages really need improvement. You can make use of several speed improvement techniques, such as image optimization, combining or minifying CSS and JS files, using a caching engine, CDN, etc.

Further Reading:

• How to Dramatically Improve Page Load Times
• Our Favorite Google Analytics Hacks that Actually Help You Grow [podcast]
• Creating Google Analytics Funnels and Goals: A Step-by-Step Guide
• 5 Ways to Track Your Website’s Revenue with Google Analytics

Organic Search Appearance on Google

Have you linked and verified your website on Google Search Console? If not, you should do that, as should all webmasters. Simply go to Search Console and add your web property there. You can verify it using one of the following methods:

• HTML file upload
• Through the domain name provider
• HTML meta tag
• GA tracking code
• Google Tag Manager container snippet

Once your site is verified, data on its search appearance will be available on Google Search Console. You need to now link Search Console and Google Analytics.

Go to your Google Analytics Admin page and under the Property section, look for “Product Linking”. Here, select “All Products” and then select “Search Console” to link your Analytics account to Search Console. Select the Views to associate the link with.

After you link, you will have an additional report on your Analytics View. Under Acquisition, you will see the Search Console section that populates some important data. The Queries report is especially insightful. It will give you the search queries for which the pages from your website appeared.

The report shows you the following important metrics:

• Clicks: If the URL that appears on Google is clicked on by a user, it’s recorded as a “click.” As you can see, the number of impressions is always equal to or greater than the number of clicks.
• Impressions: An impression is recorded when a URL from your website appears on Google for a search query.
• CTR: Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of the number of clicks to the number of impressions.
• Average Position: This is the position at which your URL appeared on Google search. The higher the position, the better the CTR is.

This is why the number one spot in Google search is the most coveted: it gives a minimum CTR of 20%, which is exceptionally good.
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Let’s look at a couple of scenarios here.

• Your search position is low: If this is the case, you need to improve your ranking with various SEO tactics, such as building more content around the keyword, augmenting the existing content, or building more links to the ranking pages.
• Your position is good, but CTR is low: You need to rethink the title and description of your ranking page. A few techniques could be: improving the title, meta description, adding rich snippets, adding site links, etc.

Geography

Certain businesses target specific geographies. A restaurant is a good example. Local search appearance is key for such businesses. Your Analytics tool can give you in-depth geographical traffic data. This is the starting point of optimizing your website for specific locations.

Google Analytics can tell you which continent, country, or city your visitors are coming from. Go to Audience > Geo > Location in the left-hand column. Add the Secondary Dimension of Page Title (click on the drop-down arrow on the “Secondary dimension” button and search for “page title”), and you will see exactly which pages are visited by people from these geographies.

If your local business is not getting enough attention from your home ground, you really need to work on its local SEO.

Further Reading:

• The Complete Guide to Local SEO
• How To Optimize Your Facebook Page For Local Searches
• Guide to Marketing Your Local Business
• 9 Factors that Can Immensely Boost Your Local SEO

Mobile Optimization

These days, with the burgeoning popularity of smartphones and tablets, you need to make sure that your website is well optimized for mobile devices. As of 2016, traffic from mobile devices surpassed traffic from desktops and laptops.

If you have a responsive and mobile-friendly website, most of your traffic may be from smartphones and tablets. You can check whether this is true in your Analytics report.

Under Audience, go to Mobile and click Devices. You will see the report on all the mobile devices used to access your website.

As you can see, the iPhone has accounted for over 551 visits during the selected period. Altogether the mobile devices have accounted for over 3,100 visits. Whether this is decent traffic or not depends on your overall traffic for the same period.

Having more than 50% of visits from mobile devices on average is a strong indicator that Google thinks your site is looking good on mobile devices. Also, you can check additional metrics on mobile device visits, such as the bounce rate and time on page. Compare that with the desktop visits, and you will get an idea of whether your mobile website is appealing enough.

Based on the data, you should optimize your site for more mobile traffic by using technologies such as Google AMP.

Organic Search Appearance on Other Search Engines

Besides Google, there are other search engines that have decent market share on organic search. Some of the other top-ranking search engines include Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, and Ask.

Source

So, indubitably, you need to rank well for some of these other search engines. There are guidelines you can follow to rank better on an alternative search engine, such as Bing.

You can get an idea of your search appearance on these important search engines by analyzing your source/medium report in Google Analytics. Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. Here, you need to apply an advanced filter in order to get only the organic traffic from search engines.

In the advanced filter, select the Include option for Source/Medium matching the following regular expression (without quotes): “(.*)s/sorganic”.

This regular expression matches anything that has the word “organic” followed by a backslash. The “s” characters are given to add spaces as shown by Google Analytics in its reports.

After you apply, you should see a report as given below:

This report tells you that this site doesn’t have nearly enough traffic from Bing, Yahoo or Yandex.

Ideally, based on the search engine market share image above, you should have approximately 5.39% of traffic coming from Bing. That means over 667 (5.39% of 12,375 total visits) visits should be from Bing, but the site gets only 289 visits. So, there is definitely room for improvement here.

Internal Navigation Structure

As you probably know, the navigation structure of your website is pretty important for SEO — it helps to retain your visitors and allow them to find important resources on your website. You need an effective navigation to take visitors to important landing pages and make them take an action, such as purchasing something or downloading a brochure.

You may structure the navigation of your site hoping that visitors will take the right paths from the home page as well as other pages, but if your goals are not being met, then you should check into this.

Your Analytics report can tell you clearly where your visitors are going and what actions they are taking. This is accessible from a special report you can find under Behavior > Behavior Flow in GA.

Behavior Flow is a visual report that gives a lot of information about your navigation structure. This can easily help you fix your site’s navigation.

In the Behavior Flow report, click on one of the landing pages listed, and then select the option “Highlight traffic through here.” It will give you the path that users take via that page. For instance, you can see from the image below that out of 17k visitors on the home page, over 10k dropped off (bounced), and the rest went to the following pages:

• /contact/ – 1.6k
• /careers-main/ – 1.2k
• /about/ – 1k
• /careers/ – 693
• /about/leadership/ – 365

This report clearly tells you that there are certain navigation elements (links or buttons) that visitors are taking.

You can click on any of the threads to highlight the traffic through that thread. In the below image, the traffic from the home page to /careers-main/ is highlighted.

This flow will show you exactly how many people came from the home page to the career page, the sources of these visitors, and where they went after the career page.

This kind of visitor flow information is extremely important for you to tweak your site’s navigation structure in order to bring your visitors to desired locations on your site. You can also identify the pages that are not getting enough attention from your visitors. With this data, you can add additional links or buttons to important pages or remove attention-grabbing CTAs to unimportant pages.

Further Reading:

• Mobile-First Indexing: Everything You Need to Prepare Your Site For 2018
• Here’s How to Use Web Analytics to Boost Content Marketing Performance
• 5 SEO Strategies to Maximize Traffic (Casey Winters, Jilliene Helman, Bryce Welker, & MORE!)
• How to Create a Marketing Funnel that Generates Sales (Templates Included)

Identifying the Interests of Your Visitors

In general, Google categorizes users based on their interests and what they are in the market for. This data is provided in two lists — Affinity Categories and In-Market Segments.

• Affinity Categories are the categories of users higher up in the purchase funnel. These are the people who have just begun their search for specific products and services.
• In-Market Segments, on the other hand, refer to the people who are actively searching for specific products and services. Hence, they are probably at the lower end of the purchase funnel, and they are likely to make a purchase on your website.

Look at the Audience > Interests > Affinity Categories report. Here, you should see the broad categories that your visitors belong to. This is very important because you will find opportunities to tweak your content and incoming links to ensure that your target audience is in the appropriate broad category.

The image above shows the Affinity Categories report for a software company site. The website seems to be appropriately targeted, as the top segments are shoppers and technophiles.

Now go to Audience > Interests > In-Market Segments to find the specific In-Market segments your visitors belong to. Here is the In-Market Segments report for the same IT firm:

You can see that the top visitors are active job seekers.

Targeting job seekers is important for an IT company, but it’s usually of secondary importance. This report tells you that the company needs to focus more on bringing more In-Market Segment audiences seeking to buy specific software products or services, and less on targeting job seekers. Further analysis of top-ranking pages on the website and incoming links will reveal why the firm’s website is ranking for career opportunities.

Identifying Useful Incoming Links

There are several ways to find the incoming links to your website. Google Search Console is an easy place to find your incoming links. You can also use one of the many SEO analysis products out there, such as Open Site Explorer.

You may create a large percentage of your incoming links only for the purpose of SEO, not for bringing visitors to your site, but you can use Google Analytics to find incoming links that your visitors actually use to come to your website.

The clicks and subsequent CTR on an incoming link has never been definitively proven to be a ranking factor. However, it’s logical to assume that high-CTR links are valuable links. So, if any link that appears on a web page (despite whether it’s dofollow or nofollow) gets clicked enough times by legitimate visitors, Google may assume that link to be valuable. Ergo, the target page is a valuable page.

In order to find such links that actually bring traffic to your site, you can use Google Analytics’ referrals report. Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals. To narrow down the exact referral path, you may add the Secondary Dimension “Referral Path” (click the drop-down menu under “Secondary Dimension” and type in “referral path” to find it).

With this report, you can easily see which links are bringing traffic and which links need more attention. You can approach specific linking domains and request that they add links to additional resources on your site or have them change the link text to something more attractive. Such techniques can further improve your CTR and traffic.

Learning Which Links Lead Users Out

Let’s come back to the navigation of your site. Your aim is probably to have visitors stay on your site for as long as possible to do certain actions, such as:

• An e-commerce site wants visitors to go out only through a checkout page.
• A blog wants visitors to go out through a subscription confirmation page.
• A corporate website wants visitors to leave contact details and go out through a contact confirmation page.

Nobody wants the visitor to go out through an outbound link on a blog post, for instance. You want to be able to track whether a visitor is exiting your website through an outbound link. You may want to move down or remove the links that contribute to maximum exits. For this, you want to track events on your website using Google Analytics.

Specifically, you need to track link click events, which can be done with GA and Google Tag Manager. This event tracking will generate an Events report under Behavior. But you can visualize your events better with the Event Flow report (Behavior > Events > Event Flow).

The Event Flow report will tell you exactly which external links were clicked by the visitors during their traversing of your site. If you find specific links to be damaging for visitor retention, you can take action on them: move them down, change the link text, or remove them altogether.

Conclusion

I hope that this article helps you make full use of your web analytics tool to improve your SEO. Traffic can always be improved further with the optimizations suggested by your analytics and yet on an average, only 8% of the entire Internet uses Google Analytics. The other web analytics tools are used even more scarcely. If you aim to make your site successful, start tracking it diligently with a web analytics tool.

The post How to Optimize Your Site for Search Ranking with Your Web Analytics Data appeared first on Single Grain.