Web Analytics - Search Insights You Can Act On Today

Web analytics can essentially be defined as:

The process of tracking how visitors interact with your website.

If you or your client are attempting to make money on the Web, however, and are establishing a website in the hopes of growing your business, we need to tack on three additional words:

The process of tracking how visitors' interactions with your site affect your business.

WordStream's Web analytics tools provide you with information that is:

Search-Focused - The information provided by the software is streamlined; WordStream's Web analytics reporting is designed to present you with data based on actual search traffic that is specifically useful for your search engine marketing campaigns.
Actionable - While analysis and reporting are important, acting on the insights derived from this data is essential to PPC success. WordStream recognizes this and ensures that every piece of data collected through web analytics is introduced into a dashboard that allows you take action: quickly group and organize keywords, attach ad text, and post them to your Google AdWords account instantly.

This means that you'll be more productive and effective in your PPC campaigns. This page will go into detail as to how exactly you can achieve this productivity and efficacy.

Our Web Analytics Software: How it Works

WordStream is an integrated keyword management system with a search engine marketing focus that offers a suite of Web analytics solutions. This isn't a "traditional" Web analytics toolset, though.

WordStream's Web analytics tools are specially designed to help drive high-intent traffic to your website, traffic that will increase your profit margins and help grow your business. The tools accomplish this by:

Offering Only Essential Data - Many times, a Web analytics dashboard will be full of confusing metrics and daunting charts and graphs that deal with everything from usability to search. WordStream Web analytics focuses on the interrelationship of analysis and action known as "actalytics," and provides you with a straightforward look at the crucial statistics that will make or break your search marketing campaign (and subsequently: will determine the success of your online marketing endeavors).
Integrating Web Analytics Information into an Actionable Platform - This is key: Analytic data is of no value to your business if you can't and/or don't actually act on it. WordStream not only collects information about your website: it also funnels it into your WordStream dashboard, where you can start to respond to the information WordStream's Web analytics tools have gathered for you.

Thus, you'll be armed with easy to understand metrics that indicate which actions will help you bring purchase-minded traffic to your site.

Then you can instantly take action.

Here's how it works...

Web Marketing Analytics

A lot of the power of WordStream's Web analytics tools lies in the things that they ignore.

A search marketing focused solution, WordStream won't offer you complicated "data pukes" and leave you to interpret the information for yourself. WordStream recognizes that success in PPC is reliant on a keyword and analytics-driven solution that’s integrated in a shared workspace, without unnecessary overflows of data that will hinder your progress.

The application provides you with invaluable insights about how best to optimize your campaign so that you can attract more search traffic and achieve higher Quality Scores.

The tool collects this information in three ways:

Google Analytics Integration

This is the easiest way to get started with Web and keyword analysis in WordStream. If you already have a Google Analytics account, you can simply link it to your WordStream account, enabling WordStream to collect new keyword data from Google Analytics on a daily basis.

Web Analytics Integration

This will not only ensure that your keyword database grows on a continuous basis, with new, highly relevant keywords added to your research every day. It also provides you with invaluable data on which keywords -- both paid and organic -- are driving the most traffic and conversions. The difference is, this analytic data is fully actionable in WordStream, not so of an analytics application alone.

Web Log Analysis

Upon signing up for an account or a free trial of WordStream, you can parse your website's log files with the WordStream Parser (for more information on using the Parser, please see the WordStream Getting Started Guide). The Parser will then "parse" your site's log data, retrieving all of the terms people have used to reach your website and the number of visitors each keyword has brought.

By basing your keyword research on actual, personalized search data from your own customers, you’re able to develop a more relevant repository of keywords, and can group them accordingly to boost your quality score and conversion rates. Drawing from real traffic, you’re tapping into a resource that’s far more accurate than the third party estimates that most others are using.

JavaScript Analytics

When you start with your WordStream account or free trial setup, you'll also insert a snippet of JavaScript code on the footer of each of your pages. Things to note about this process:

Quick - Installing the JavaScript takes all of a few minutes.
Painless - The code interacts seamlessly with other JavaScript-based analytic tools.

This snippet of code enables WordStream to continually track the same metrics it extracted from your site's historical log data: keywords, and the traffic they drive to your site. This will help you to continue to accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and automatically discover new and important keywords to include (or exclude).

Once you have uploaded your log data and placed the application's JavaScript on your site, you'll be able to access a list of the keywords people have used to reach your website:

Web analytics from WordStream offer you search focused metrics and data tracking, as pictured.

There are three important things to note in this Web analytics dashboard.

Keyword and Visit Totals - The metric atop the screen lets you know how many keywords have been stored in your WordStream database.
Keyword Visualization - The middle of the screen offers you another way of browsing your WordStream keyword database. The graph is sorted by keyword popularity, so you can quickly look at the more popular terms, or scan down the long tail to find less popular keywords, quickly and easily viewing how much traffic they are driving to your site.
Keyword Data Grid - The bottom half of the screen is dedicated to a keyword list. This provides you with a detailed view of the keywords people are using to reach your site, and the number of visits each keyword has sent.

Additionally, WordStream's Web analytic insights are automatically turned into actionable suggestions. Analytics is useless without action, as you can see from our actalytics solutions page. Read more about how this works by visiting our keyword grouping and PPC management pages.

With the above screenshot, the thing to keep in mind is that we can view key metrics from a single dashboard; the interface is very simple and intuitive. This allows you to focus, using a hub to control your campaign rather than several different keyword tools, Excel spreadsheets, and a myriad of scattered, disorganized information.

Additionally, you are instantly informed about the performance of various meta keywords within your campaign.

Being able to view and sort your keyword database by these integral and poignantly meaningful numbers enables you to:

Be More Efficient - In being able to visualize which words and word groupings are driving traffic and sales, you can better prioritize workflow, dedicating your time and efforts to the areas of your search engine marketing and search engine optimization campaigns.
Improve Your Results - Being able to view and respond to this critical information is essential to the construction of successful search marketing campaigns.

But, in order to truly capitalize on even the most intelligently streamlined set of important metrics with web analytics, you need to have a means of efficiently acting on the data being presented to you.

You Need More Than a Web Analytics Tool

It's not enough to be fed static numbers that you can't pivot and implement into your marketing efforts.

WordStream immediately introduces each and every Web metric it collects into your account dashboard. From there, you can take your researched keywords and start manipulating them.

From within your WordStream account you can put your data to work in the following ways:

Query Keywords - WordStream offers several means of viewing and segmenting your keyword database. You can discover all of the tightly related keywords for a given phrase in under a second, and then investigate the terms within that grouping in a number of ways that will prove insightful and useful, rather than merely providing you with information for information's sake.
Group Keywords - Use this wealth of keyword data and these querying and segmentation tools to actually create real Keyword Groups and keyword hierarchies that you can then publish to your AdWords account or leverage for SEO purposes.

Having amassed a list of keywords (over time, accounts' keyword lists often grow to number in the millions) you can now start to play with these numbers in ways that will actually inform your search marketing campaigns:

Utilize WordStream's querying capabilities to perform deep keyword research and web analysis, as pictured.

What's happening in the image above is the querying of your personal WordStream database. By simply typing in the phrase "real estate" we have filtered all terms in our database except those that contain real AND estate, in some order. All in less than a second.

We can now create a group around this phrase with the click of a button:

Group your web analytics efforts with the click of a button using the WordStream tool, as pictured.

This step can be repeated ad infinitum, until you are happy with your keyword segmentation.

Even more powerfully, you can leverage the web analytics data from WordStream's to receive grouping suggestions for keywords: the software will tell you which groups are statistically important. By clicking the "Segment Group" button, WordStream will provide you with the Keyword Group Segmenter, offering suggestions for terms with which you can create other groups.

WordStream offers actionable web analytics suggestions, such as which keyword groups to create.

You can also expand your segmentation to create more granular sub-groups.

To make the process even simpler, WordStream now offers the functionality of being able to create multiple groups simultaneously, as shown below:

Create multiple groups simultaneously with WordStream's keyword segmentation solutions

Again we see that WordStream's Web analytics tools are a single click away from implementation; you can have any of these recommended segmentations transformed into keyword groups with the click of a button.

Creating groups like these isn’t strictly for your own organization. In creating Keyword Groups in this way, you are leveraging your Web analytics data and transforming your list of keyword phrases into a Quality Score friendly series of Ad Groups, thus decreasing your costs and allowing you to directly respond to your searchers’ original intents through specific, relevant text ads to match their queries.

After you create a series of groupings and child groupings, you'll have a keyword tree that looks something like this:

Act on your web analytics information from within the dashboard of WordStream's fully integrated search marketing software solution.

Here we see that by pairing WordStream's Web analytics tools with the application's grouping capabilities, a series of very closely related, high-performance keyword groups have been created.

This key phrase tree can also be utilized in organic search. By understanding how people are searching for your services or products, you’re better able to prioritize your content. In the snap shot above we can see a search-friendly structure which:

Suggests an information architecture
Provides you with a host of valuable keywords for organic search content creation
And even suggests to you how best to format your on-page content.

Additionally, note the highlighted portions of the image above: you can actually take these carefully researched, newly grouped terms and turn them into an Ad Group or a page of Web content with a single click.