The bottom line for any marketing endeavor is return on investment (ROI). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has its place within a company's online advertising budget. Rankings are only a means to an end. Most SEO campaigns produce a positive impact on ROI. Web analytics software gives you the necessary data to make informed decisions regarding your online marketing efforts. This article will discuss Urchin’s Web analytics software and how it can benefit a Search Engine Optimizer and their client’s bottom-line.
Overview of Important Web Analytic Features for the SEO
Most Web analytics software are able to report on fundamental statistics such as visitors, hits, page views, bytes, top pages, entrance pages, exit pages, referrals, search engine keywords, browser and computer types and more. This information empowers a search engine marketer with basic information on how well his/her site is performing. Urchin 5.5 takes this one step further. Through the use of first party cookies, they provide additional details as to the nature of your Web visitor.
How visitors discover your site is as important as the action the visitor takes after reaching your site. Referrals, the technical term for how a Web visitor comes to locate your site, is one of the areas that SEOs track on regular basis. Referral information is able to give you data on where the user came from, such as a search engine, affiliate, article or no referral at all. In addition, this information can be broken down into which search engines brought you the traffic to you and which keywords the searcher typed in to find your Web pages.
As a marketer, you need not only focus on how the Web visitor arrives at your Web pages but perhaps more importantly what the Web visitor does after they land on your page of interest. I challenge you to take a look at your log files. I can guarantee that most of your Web visitors hit your pages and their most likely next action is to leave your site. One goal you should set immediately after reading this sentence is to reduce that exit rate! Even by just a small percentage. Keep that visitor on your site! Web analytics software can help you monitor all of this with ease. Set up one goal per page and make sure to increase the success rate of that goal on a weekly basis. The goal can be a purchase, add to cart, download a pdf, fill out a form or call a special 800 number - it can be any action that you want the user to take once they hit that page. Monitoring your micro goals will make the difference in your bottom-line.
With Urchin's first party cookies, which they named "Urchin Tracking Module" (UTM), you can track these goals easily. In addition, you can track the number of times a visitor comes back to that page and the length of time it takes a specific user to reach a goal. I will explain all of this information in detail as you read on. The point is that Urchin gives us data that can be used to increase our client's ROI. Urchin goes beyond any other Web analytics program I have ever used, and it is affordable.
The remainder of this article will go through detailed screen shots of the Search Engine Roundtable Weblog's log files and tracking through Urchin. Although the Weblog does not have e-commerce capabilities, I will try to explain what you will see if the e-commerce module was activated. For an overview of Urchin's features please visit Urchin's feature list at http://www.urchin.com/products/feature_list_master.html.
Search Optimization 
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