Track External Links

When constructing your Web site, you are likely to have links that are both internal and external. Internal links refer to the links that send the visitor to other pages within your site, and external links refer to the links that send a visitor to a Web site other than your own. Google Analytics can show you how your visitors navigate your internal links, but what if they leave your site by clicking an external link? By tweaking the way you construct your external links, Google Analytics can keep track of how many visitors you are sending out, despite the absence of your tracking code on these outside pages.

If you choose to monetize your Web site with offers from affiliate marketing or cost-per-action (CPA) networks, you should keep your own data on how much traffic you send to each of these external sites. This allows you to compare your own figures with those the affiliate program or ad network provides. In the event that you find large differences between what you seem to be sending out and what the affiliate network is reporting as received for the same period, ask your affiliate manager to look into this for you.

If you do any reciprocal link trading, you will want to keep track of how much traffic you are sending out to your link partners. If you send a site double the clicks that that site sends you each month, you may want to negotiate a better placement of your link, or reconsider the trade depending on the quality of traffic the site sends. As with everything else, the more information you have about your site, the better.

Designing and using a relevant and easy to remember structure for tracking your outbound links is very important. The first step is to decide on a folder name that is not being used in your actual Web site. Some examples may include “outgoing,” “external,” or “clicks.” This keeps all the pages for external clicks organized. Second, the best practice for separating sites is to use the URL of the site you are linking to. Using the name of the Web site may get confusing and does not allow you to distinguish where you sent the visitor if you have multiple external links to various pages on another domain. Some examples of good names include “example_com” or “example_com_pagename.” Keeping accurate track of where you are sending your visitors allows you to gauge the general value of your Web site to your linking partners in terms of traffic.

Logging clicks on your outbound links can also provide you with a supplement to your bounce rate. If a page has a high bounce rate, you may be wondering where all that traffic is going. However, if you log your outbound clicks, you can determine how many of your visitors clicked external links and went elsewhere instead of to other pages on your site.

Designing and using a relevant and easy to remember structure for tracking your outbound links is very important. The first step is to decide on a folder name that is not being used in your actual Web site. Some examples may include “outgoing,” “external,” or “clicks.” This keeps all the pages for external clicks organized.

Automate Reporting

Google Analytics can be set to automatically e-mail you selected reports on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. Daily reports show the data for the previous day, and are sent out each morning. Weekly reports show the data for the previous Monday through Sunday, and are sent out each Monday morning. Monthly reports are sent out on the first of the month, and provide the data for the previous month. Quarterly reports are sent on the first day of each quarter, and report all the collected data for the previous quarter. Any portion of your reports can be added to the automated e-mail feature, giving you, or other people of your choice, full access to the most important data from your Web site.

Google Analytics automated reporting is also extremely useful because it allows you to automatically e-mail reports to other people that are involved with your company or Web site in some way, without giving them access to view all the collected data in your Analytics reports. For example, you may want to show a consultant ongoing reports on your page views, but not on your revenue or traffic sources.

Be cautious when deciding the frequency of your automated Google Analytics reports. If you have a limited amount of storage space in your e-mail inbox, you may quickly reach your limit if you have several PDF files being mailed to you on a daily basis. It is also important to remember that Google Analytics does not include any data from the current day when your report is sent. Your reports show the collected data up to the last fully completed day.

Adding additional e-mail recipients to existing Google Analytics e-mail reports is easy. At any time, you can include additional e-mail addresses to your pre-existing schedules by simply clicking Email on the left side menu on any page of your Analytics reports, selecting the schedule you want to edit, and adding the new e-mail address. Similarly, this method can also be used to stop an e-mail address from receiving any additional reports.

You may also delete any scheduled e-mail report by clicking Email on the left side menu on any page of your Google Analytics reports, and then clicking the trash can icon across from the schedule you want to remove. Be aware that the removal of these schedules is effective immediately.

The reports can be sent in a variety of formats, including PDF, XML, CSV, and TSV. The PDF option is ideal if you want to print your reports in order to have hard copies for your own records, or for sharing with others. The XML, CSV, and TSV files are ideal for building long-term databases of your Web site statistics.

Using Analytics to Find New Keywords

You can use the Traffic Sources report in Google Analytics to locate new keywords to add to your pay-per-click campaigns and search-engine optimization efforts. Selecting a traffic source like Google or Yahoo presents you with a list of keywords. These are the words your viewers are searching for and using to eventually land at your Web site. You can also view the number of hits, goal conversions, and the e-commerce value of each individual keyword.

Many of the top searched keywords in your report will also be the keywords you have already been targeting in your marketing efforts. However, if you take the time to mine the data contained in the report, you are likely to find keywords that will significantly improve your overall business efforts. For example, a specific keyword related to your product or service may have sent you only 30 visitors over the course of the month, but if those few visits resulted in three conversions, that keyword is a valuable target.

Another advantage of mining the data contained in your keyword reports is locating the potential for large traffic sources. For example, imagine you find a keyword that has sent you a few hundred visitors from Google in the past 30 days, but is not one of the keywords you have been actively targeting.

Go to Google and do a search for that keyword. Are you on the first page of results? The second? If a keyword is already sending you a fair amount of traffic, and you are listed as result number 8 for that keyword, imagine the traffic you would receive if you were in the top three results. This method can help you locate some high-volume keywords that you may have missed or underestimated in your initial keyword generation.

Searching through your keyword reports may also help you identify common words or phrases that your target audience is using when looking for your products or services. By tapping into commonly used phrases about your topic, you can develop a successful campaign that targets low-volume, but high-converting keywords.

When looking through your keyword reports, limit yourself to analyzing at least 30 days of historical data or more. Looking at these large time ranges gives you a more accurate view of the potential in your referring keywords. For example, just because a particular keyword may have sent you one visitor and one conversion in the same day does not mean that that pattern will continue over a period of time. On occasion, an isolated conversion slips in without being an indication of any sort of pattern. Similarly, a keyword may send you 20 visitors one day, but only 3 visitors the next day. Looking at larger time frames gives you a much more accurate estimate of actual traffic volume and value.