SEO
The Only 3 Google Analytics Metrics You Need to Track
Google Analytics collects a massive amount of data about user traffic and behavior on your website, ranging from acquisition to conversion.
While the amount of data you can get is amazing, you don’t need to track every single thing. Trying to do so will send you down a rabbit hole with no real outcome. There are only three metrics you need to track growth over time.
But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what a metric is.
What is a metric in Google Analytics?
Metrics are quantitative measurements that tell you how some aspect of your website performed. For example, the number of times a specific page was viewed or how many times a certain video was played.
It’s important to note that metrics are different from dimensions. Dimensions are what your metrics are measured against. This means instead of just measuring users, you could measure users (metric) by channel (dimension).
Three Google Analytics metrics you should be tracking
There are over 100 different metrics available in Google Analytics (GA), but only three metrics are useful for tracking growth over time.
1. Users
At the most basic level, you need to know if the marketing efforts are resulting in site growth.
Users will tell you exactly that. The users metric in GA tells us how many unique visitors a website received within a set period of time and provides a high-level view of whether marketing efforts are resulting in site growth.
To view all users by traffic source, open the Life cycle > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition report and set your desired date range.
The report will automatically display the session default channel grouping. Default channel grouping is the marketing channel defined by GA and utilized by new and returning users to arrive on your site or app.
For example, the screenshot below shows that we received 3,666 users from Organic Search in Q4 2021:
To find the traffic’s source, we can add a secondary dimension by clicking on the blue “plus” sign next to Session default channel grouping and selecting Session Acquisition > Session source.
To see the percent change, we can add a comparison period. In the top right, click on the date range drop-down arrow and select a custom date range for Q4 > Compare > Preceding period (match day of week) to compare performance.
Which comparison period you should choose will depend on various factors like how old the GA account is, if seasonality plays a role in the business, or if the company is new to investing in the marketing channel.
We chose the previous period for this example because the site did not have GA set up last year and seasonality does not play a major role.
The screenshot below shows an overall decrease in users by 18.95%, but Google/Organic Search increased by 24.75% in Q4 2021 as compared to Q3 2021.
2. User engagement
Now that we know where users are coming from, we need to understand what content they’re engaging with and what fails to earn their attention.
Average engagement time tells us the average length of time that the site had focus in the user’s browser. (Meaning the user was most likely looking at it.)
By viewing this metric for different pages on our site, we can learn what articles to write more of (those with the highest engagement time) and which articles require further analysis (low engagement time).
To view all users by traffic source, open the Life cycle > Engagement > Pages and screens report and set your desired date range.
Now we need to segment this data to just the traffic source we are analyzing.
Take Google organic. We can add a dimension by clicking on Add comparison in the top left, adding the “session/source medium” dimension, adding the “google/organic” dimension values, and removing “All Users” by hovering over text and clicking the “x.”
You can change how the data is displayed in the table using the drop-down arrow. If you prefer to see the page title, select “Page title.” Or if you want to know the URL, choose Page path + query string and screen class.
Lastly, click on the Average engagement time column to sort the table from highest to lowest.
In the example below, Google organic search users are interested in fixing GA4 missing or invalid ID errors. Creating more content about fixing GA errors may be helpful.
Now that you know what topics are resonating with your readers the most, plug them into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find similar topics people are searching for.
3. Conversions
The most important metric is conversions. Conversions are user activities that contribute to the success of your business.
A Conversion in GA4 is equivalent to what we know as a Goal in Universal Analytics (UA).
To view the Conversions report in GA4, open the Life cycle > Engagement > Conversions report. You will see collected events automatically marked as conversions and any event that you manually marked as a conversion.
The image above shows conversions in Q4 2021 compared to Q4 2020 (matching day of the week). You can drill down to a specific conversion by clicking on the blue text, such as clicking on purchase.
Now we can see the marketing channel where purchases came from.
Going beyond the basic metrics
The three metrics above are great for tracking your site’s growth over time, but they don’t tell you much beyond that.
If you want to know more about who’s visiting your site, how they’re interacting with it, and what you can do to improve performance, you’ll need to analyze other metrics in the context of what you’re trying to achieve.
Let’s look at a few of these metrics and how they can be useful.
1. New and returning visitors
By viewing new and returning users, you can understand which channels bring in the most engaged users and if your customers are more likely to convert on their first visit or return visits.
A new user is someone who visits your website for the first time. GA tracks this by looking at whether someone has a User ID or a Device ID from your site/app. If they don’t, they’re counted as a new user.
It is important to analyze new users because knowing where they come from can help improve inbound marketing efforts and conversion funnels.
Looking at returning users is important because it can help you better understand which products or content pages bring your customers back.
To view new and returning users, open the Life cycle > Retention report in GA4 and set a comparison date range. The report will automatically display new users, and you can toggle to see returning users.
In the above example, we can see New users increased by 181.7% compared to the preceding period.
For a more robust report, we need to open the Audience > Behavior > New vs Returning report in UA.
The UA report will show you acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics by user type: new and returning visitors.
In the above report, we see more conversions come from new visitors, but returning visitors convert at a higher rate.
From here, we can segment to Organic traffic and add a secondary dimension: landing page. This will allow us to see which organic landing pages new users are converting on.
We may find patterns in the content that converts and identify pages to A/B test CTAs (call to actions) on.
2. Events
Events provide insight into what users are doing on the site. This information can be used to better inform A/B testing.
To view user event metrics, open Life cycle > Engagement > Events report in GA4. The report will show the automatically collected events and any enhanced measurement events you added.
Right now, the information available in GA4 is limited. We can click on the event name to see event count by country, sessions, and page location. But we cannot open the Page Location tile to get anything useful from the data.
For a more robust report, use UA. The UA report can display revenue, transactions, and eCommerce Conversion rate data by event label. Here’s how to do it.
Open UA. Click on Behavior > Events > Top events report. You will see a table of all your event categories. Event categories will depend on how event buckets are set up in Google Tag Manager (GTM).
For this example, we will select the Enhanced Ecommerce event category. Now we see event actions. Event Action is going to tell us what the user did.
In this example, we will click on “Quickview Click” because we want to know all the different products users selected as a “quick view.”
One more step, find the tab labeled Explorer above the events graph and below the segment All Users, then click Ecommerce.
Now our table is pulling in our product pages that have triggered the “quick view” event and displaying the eCommerce conversion rate for these specific product pages.
Here is where the analysis really begins. We can start to understand how user behavior is helping or hurting conversions and ultimately define some A/B tests.
3. Pageviews
Pageviews tell us the number of times a specific webpage was viewed, which by itself isn’t very helpful. But when segmented by a marketing channel, it can tell us how to improve performance.
To view pageviews, open Life cycle > Engagement > Pages and screens report. Filter the report to a source/medium like google/organic by clicking “Add comparison” and selecting a session source/medium dimension with a value of google/organic.
Scroll down and take a look at the page title table. You will see views and engagement metrics like average engagement time and unique user scrolls here.
If there are a lot of pageviews but the average engagement time or scroll depth is low, then it may not be the content people were expecting. Try rewriting the introduction found in these articles to grab the readers’ attention.
In the case of google/organic, you may want to investigate how well pages with high pageviews are performing in organic search for their target keywords.
If they’re in positions #2–10, you can get way more traffic just by ranking a few positions higher—so that may be a good focus. Of course, you can check ranking positions by plugging the URL into Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker.
Final thoughts
GA can quickly become confusing because there are so many numbers and so much technical jargon.
But for tracking success, you only need to focus on the handful of important metrics shared in this article: users, engagement, and conversions.
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It
Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when…
SEO
8 Free SEO Reporting Tools
There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?
In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.
Price: Free
Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.
Most common reporting use case
GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.
As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:
- Total Impressions
- Average CTR
- Average Position
Tip
But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.
If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.
Price: Free
Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.
Most common reporting use case
Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.
Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.
Such as:
- Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
- Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
- Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
- Social media platforms – Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter
- Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage
Sidenote.
If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks
Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:
With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.
Favorite feature
The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.
Price: Free for 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.
Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.
Most common reporting use case
When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.
Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.
Favorite feature
Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs.
If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.
Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.
Price: Free
Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.
For example, you could use our:
Most common reporting use case
One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.
With AWT, you can:
- Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
- See the performance of your website
- Check all known backlinks for your website
Favorite feature
Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.
If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).
Price: Free
Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.
Most common reporting use case
For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.
With the free version, you get the following features:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
- Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
- SERP positions
- Country changer for SERP
The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.
If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.
Favorite feature
The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.
Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.
Price: Free
Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.
Most common reporting use case
GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.
Favorite feature
You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.
Price: Free
Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.
Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.
Most common reporting use cases
The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.
This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.
Price: Free
Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.
Most common reporting use cases
Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.
Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.
Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.
Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.
Favorite feature
Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.
Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.
You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.
Final thoughts
These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.
The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.
Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂
SEO
Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO
A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.
These findings include:
- When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
- 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
- Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.
Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.
As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.
High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects
The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.
The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.
The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.
This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.
The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.
Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results
With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.
When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.
Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.
New Competition From Unexpected Sources
The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.
On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.
An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.
Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search
The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.
Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:
“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”
Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.
Methodology & Limitations
To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.
The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.
While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.
Why We Care
The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.
Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.
SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.
As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.
How This Could Help You
While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.
Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:
- As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
- Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
- Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
- Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
- Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.
Looking Ahead
While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.
By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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