What Do We Need From A Web Analytics Tool?
Web analytics is an essential building block for any web business. There are many analytics tools available and they differ dramatically in their capability to assist with improving SEM performance. SEO agencies may recommend additional tools to help you measure SEO success.
We need to see the following from Web Analytics Tool:
Reports on all keyphrases referred from search engines, i.e. it isn’t limited to 100 phrases.
Keyphrases are reported separately for different referring search engines, e.g. Google, Bing and different country versions.
Keyphrases separated out into those from natural and paid listings.
Outcomes such as sale or registration can be determined for different phrases and for those generated from SEO or paid-search, i.e. tools should be able to report on bounce rate and conversion rate for different phrases.
Reports when the site is visited by different search robots and the pages they visit.
A spreadsheet or flat-file export of all search data (not limited to 100 phrases or based on a single report).
There are two main types of site-based web analytics tools. You will probably need both for super-effective SEM. Be sure you have at least one!
Server log-file based. The log file which is usually stored on the same server as the web server is added to every time a user downloads a piece of information, whether it is an image or page. This technique records robot visits.
Browser-based or tag-based measurement system that records access to web pages every time a page is loaded into a user’s web browser through running a short script or program which is inserted into each web page. The key benefit of the browser-based approach is that potentially it is more accurate than server-based approaches since it is not subject to caching limitations. But this technique doesn’t record robot visits.
