Above is a filterless Analytics screen shot from an actual client of ours, it doesn't look like we've had much influence over the last 4 months does it. Is this a failed SEO campaign? I certainly hope not, let's have a deeper look. Try this right now as well on any of your sites:
Log into your Analytics account and go to Search Engines in the Traffic Sources section, remember to select non-paid to filter out your AdWords data. This will give you a view of all your organic search traffic over the time-frame.
Now let's get rid of the noise that can easily cloud your evaluation. Click through to keyword level and scroll down to the bottom of the data table – here you'll find the filter. Open the "Advanced Filter" option. For this type of reviewing I normally only work with keyword filters, this gives you two options – to filter out keywords with a certain word in it or without.
In most cases you can filter out navigational searches by excluding keywords with the business name and website domain. Don't forget to also exclude common misspellings as well. Take a look at my example, the same data, just stripped of the client's name. This is what I've done above. A very different picture, one that suddenly makes me smile – incoming traffic via transactional and informational searches has actually doubled since the start of our campaign!
Apply another filter layer, over the navigational search filter as described above, and you'll get a good glimpse of how specific aspects of your campaign are progressing. An easy way of doing this is to add a filter that selects keywords that include a keyword you're targeting, normally a service- or product-specific keyword works very well. Take a look at the difference in the graph below, here I've filtered for keywords including a one word keyword specific to one of the clients services. 725% more service-specific visits in just 5 months! Yes please!
Analytics is a powerful tool, yet you've got to apply a bit of thought when interpreting the data. It can often be misleading if you don't think it through enough. Always ask whether the data you're viewing is the correct data to answer the question you're asking of it. What might be giving you a skewed picture? Unfiltered data is dangerous, and is only very rarely useful - keep that in mind next time you log on.
Take a look at my blog on utilising Google Analytics profiles to gain a better understanding on individual website areas.
