Top 10 KPIs for SEO

  Analytics, Data Reporting

Have you ever wondered which are the most important metrics you should be tracking for SEO and any other online marketing campaign? If you look at Google Analytics (GA) report they have shit load of metrics for each dimension from visits, unique visitors, page views to visits with search, avg. page load time…….zzzzzzzzz. All this make reading GA reports a headache. More the client, more are the reports and bigger is the headache. To make my life a bit easy, i track only 3 things for any dimension and i don’t track many dimensions either.

I hope you have not forgotten ‘dimension’. A dimension is a characteristic of your visitor. For e.g. for a visitor from New York city who arrived on your website via a organic search term say ‘best outdoor clothing’ on Google, the dimensions are ‘city’, ‘region’, ‘country’, ‘keyword’ and source/medium. These dimensions characterize the visitor and this is how Google Analytics reports about a visitor to your site.

 

For any online marketing campaign you would be interested in knowing:

  1. How the campaign has performed or is performing?
  2. How people who came to your site are consuming your contents?
  3. How people are engaging with your contents?

 

Metrics to track campaign’s performance/outcomes

1. Visits – As an SEO you would definitely want to know how much traffic is coming from a dimension/source.
2. Goal completions – Total no. of goals/conversions you have got.
3. Revenue – If you are an e-commerce site you would love to know which traffic source is generating revenue.
4. Goal conversion Rate – It is the percentage of visits which results in Goal conversions.
5. E-Commerce Conversion Rate – It is the percentage of visits which results in e-commerce transaction.

 

Metrics to track content consumption

1. Pageviews
2. Avg. time on site/page
3. Bounce Rate/Bounces

 

 

Metrics to measure visitors’ engagement

1. Pages/visit
2. unique Social Actions

 

These are the only 10 metrics you need to quickly and accurately track the performance of any traffic source or dimension. Now i will create a custom report which include all these metrics:

 

 

Please note: To track unique social actions you need to implement social interactions tracking on your website.

 

You can get the same custom report from here. Through this report template you can create custom reports for any dimension like keywords. If you think there are other metrics which are more cool then please share in the comments below. If you like this post then you should subscribe to my blog and follow me on twitter.

 

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Himanshu Sharma About the Author: is the founder of seotakeaways.com which provides SEO Consulting, PPC Management and Analytics Consulting services to medium and large size businesses. He holds a bachelors degree in ‘Internet Science’, is a member of 'Digital Analytics Association', a Google Analytics Certified Individual and a Certified Web Analyst. He is also the founder of EventEducation.com and EventPlanningForum.net.

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