Tracking is important, as this SEOmoz piece points out, and Google Analytics is one of the most widely used SEO tools out there for this purpose. Best practices help figure out a way to set benchmarks so that metrics and data are easily compared in order to determine success.
With so much data to mine, many SEO hosting companies and SEO marketers don’t dive deep enough, losing data that could potentially change a campaign. Benchmarking is the best way to avoid this pitfall, particularly since Google doesn’t exactly make it easy to track data at a deeper level.
Rather than simply exporting Analytics data straight to an Excel Doc to find glaring red flags, why not use this data to determine how far you’ve come toward SEO success? Use this past and current data to help your company move forward.
While it’s interesting to look at past and current data and compare them to others, what if you were able to not only compare but find out how these two sets of metrics interacted with each other over time? Benchmarking is the way to enter this SEO gray area…offering insight based upon comparing one metric to another then measuring them together over time.
Benchmarking helps you discover the momentum of your site, an oft overlooked metric that’s actually really important. This type of data helps you estimate how you’ll be doing in a week, a month, a year and helps you take more educated risks with your SEO.
Knowing the bottom line is crucial. If you’re a company that sells a product, you should know what your lowest converting month is as well as what your high is…knowing these extremes help you gauge the performance of your offseason stats.
One great thing to be able to do is identify problems (and correct them) as they’re happening, not just immediately following a disaster. Knowing how your metrics’ ratios relate to each other will help you identify slips as they’re happening by getting you to pay attention to correlating factors. You can turn this type of data into visual charts and graphs which easily allows you to identify changes in your visitors, rankings, sales, etc.
Google’s benchmarking feature leaves lots of holes that could skew your data as sites have to opt into being tracked. Since it’s important to know the norms of your industry, i.e. the metrics that you should be aiming for or above, you can identify low hanging fruit. If your bounce rates are significantly higher than everyone else’s, you’re doing something wrong.
Benchmarking, while helpful in discovering trends, is really just a method of discovery, not a foolproof formula. There are no guarantees with exploratory data since they’re based on past data and that data can change significance at a moment’s notice. Don’t lose perspective on the variables that exist independently from each other.