While talking to a potential customer, I was granted access to their analytics data. The idea was to take a look at this customer’s current situation in order to analyze it, set directions and potential goals with regards to their online presence.

The first challenge was not to spend too much time and effort as it was only an initial observation. Analyzing analytics data for the first time can take a long while and mainly if you don’t know what you are looking for. Therefore, I decided to look at the main elements: visitors, top content, top landing pages, sources and geographical trends (as this company is global but with special emphasis on the US and UK market, it seemed important).

And then it started to get interesting:

The numbers showed that their site is getting more than 40% of direct traffic, about the same percentage from search and the rest from referring site. But, further analysis revealed that most of the referral traffic is from job seekers site where – with the current economy situation – is from people that are looking for jobs (and this company is not recruiting now). As for the search, checking the keyword dimension (God bless Google Analytics) showed that huge percentage of the visitors types to Google and the other search engines the name of the company or even its exact URL (it seems that a lot of people are using Google as their browser’s home page and typing sites’ URL in Google search box instead of in the browser’s one).

We agreed that this cannot be considered as search traffic since – although brand awareness is important – those are searches that know the company rather than such that searched for this company’s offerings and got there). As a result, the revised percentages showed that only 7% of their traffic is coming from search and obviously this is something the customer was not happy with.

On the geographical dimension, we managed to see that there is brand new interest in this company from markets that they weren’t aware of. This could lead to looking to see the opportunities there – if it is a market the company wishes to operate in, to adopting their site to the proper languages required (as those were non-English speaking countries), or to taking no action at all. Still, it was perceived as a very interesting and usefull information.

To sum it all up, analytics is amazing! Google did us all a favor when granting us with this tool for free and they keep enhancing it all the time with beautiful new features. However, many companies are satisfied with just putting the code on their site so data could be gathered and others are even generating a report from the Dashboard once a month. The beauty of it is to set your specific goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and looking at them constantly.

From time to time, take a look at other metrics as well. You may find insight that is priceless to your business.

Internet Marketing Agency Belgium – part of the global network of WSI, specializing in Internet Marketing for SMB’s.
We provide Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing and Google Analytics Services in Belgium that start from the business needs, its goals and its marketing strategy and aim at showing return-on-investment.

Access important tips about the topic of web traffic – please study this publication. The times have come when concise information is really only one click of your mouse, use this possibility.