Analytics are very important to your web marketing campaign. If you do not use analytics properly you may not understand how effective your search engine marketing is.

In this article I look at some practical examples of when to use analytics and some things you need to identify in order to get the most out of your analytics.

I came across a situation today that I thought I’d share. It has to do with a client’s analytics.

Many times, as a search engine marketer, it is up to us to tell the client what they should be looking for in their analytics. Right away this seems odd to me. It’s like me telling my client what their business model is, or how they should be selling their product online.

But this does seem to be a common thread among some site owners. They had an idea for a product or service and they wanted to promote it online. So they had a website built, and may have initially had it optimized. But that is as far as their experience goes.

They have no idea on how to track progress or improvements. All to often the numbers they do look at are not the best results to view.

two perspectives on analytics – SEO and client

With my client today, we were trying to nail down what should have been important numbers. And it was a very similar case – they had invested in this super-duper analytics package that was collecting and displaying data upteen different ways, yet they had no idea how to interpret the numbers.

They thought their traffic was increasing, but they had on idea why, really, nor did they have any idea what their customers were doing once they hit the website.

And, as sometimes happens, we fell into the trap of telling them what they should be looking for.

“You want to see search engine referrals going up. That means it’s working” or “increased page views is a good thing.”

But this really isn’t solving their problem is it?

Sometimes as search marketers, we need to step back and say “I know what I need for numbers, but what does my client need to see.”

So this was the approach we took today – let’s have a discussion with the client and focus on what they want to see, not what we need to show them to prove our value as search engine marketers.

When we were done, we had not only shortened their monthly analytics report to a few key metrics (down from pages and pages of statistical analysis) but we had also decreased the time required to complete this analysis.

Sure we still will do some of the analysis for our own purposes, but does the client really care how many backlinks or pages indexed they have? Not likely.

Nope, more often than not, the client wants to know that they are making money. Pure and simple.

So, if you can show them that they are making money, that’s all they really care about. You can add value as a search engine marketer by showing areas of improvement (“did you know that your Google referrals went up by 15% this month? That proves the value of our services, yada yada yada...”)

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