These slides have been presented at Superweek, October 2012 in Sinaia, Romania by Sébastien Monnier, expert in SEO and Web Analytics

1. DON’T TRUST YOUR
ANALYTICS
Even though … it’s your Best Friend

2. Who am I?
• Since 2000 : freelance webmaster, researcher, teacher…
• 2006 – 2009: Google Search Quality and Google
Analytics teams (Dublin, Ireland)
• Since 2009: SEO in France. Founder of the SEO Agency
Woptimo
• 2011 : Co-founder of Search Quality Alliance

3. Agenda
1. Data gathering and accuracy
2. Keywords
3. Beyond your website

4. A LITTLE ANECDOTE

5. Zero Bounce Rate !!
 Bounce rate below 10% is almost impossible
 The blogger had the GA code 2 times in the source …

6. DATA GATHERING AND
ACCURACY
1. Data collection
2. Visits, PageViews, Unique Visitors : what’s the best choice?
3. Returning visitors
4. Too much traffic?
5. GWT and GA
6. Negative Analytics & Stupidity

7. What tool do you use?
 Is your tool server-side or client-side?
Number of hits ≠ Number of visits
 Each tool has its own definition of visits, PageViews, Bounce rate…

8. Accuracy
Is your tool accurate?
Check your data with several sources
 Actual sale vs Analytics
 Number of PageViews vs ads impression
 Adwords data vs Analytics data
Or just use 2 Web Analytics tools

9. What metric to chose?
It depends on what you want to achieve !

10. What do you want to do ?
Check notoriety and engagement Unique Visitors and Returning
Visitors
Impress your boss / ads PageViews (or even go for server
publisher hits!)
Daily check Number of visits segmented per
source of traffic

11. Ghost visitors …
 Have you ever noticed
- Visits from an Adwords campaign you stopped ages ago ?
- Huge number of visits for a very long tail keywords?

12. Master your source attribution
If a visitor comes to your site from a defined source of
traffic (Google organic, Google Adwords, referring sites…)
Next times he’ll visit entering urls or via bookmarks  It
won’t count as direct traffic but GA will use the original
source !
A keywords entered one time in Google can lead to
hundreds of visits by the same browser !
To avoid this, segment only New Visitors from
Organic

13. Visit’s duration
A new visit is counted every time you leave the site for 30 minutes
or more and come back to it
Let’s say you have a Flash game site that do not need to refresh
between 2 games…
Every time a user visits another page ater playing games (to save
his score for example), a new visit will be recorded.
Your organic landing pages can be a page
that is not even indexed !! (Link)

14. Negative Analytics and Stupidity
Evil Black-Hat technique
 Evil competitors can use your tracking code on other websites, or just
send http request with our GA code …
 Stupid webmasters can also make a copy-paste mistakes…

15. Work-around
Check hostname in your report
Create a filter including only your hostname

16. Too much traffic?
 If you have more than 10K visits a day, your GA will get really slower and
advanced segments won’t be accurate.
 Do not rely on number of visits for big websites’ segments. Only check big
pictures

17. Work around
 Create several profiles using include filters
 Check you data on a smallest time range

18. Webmaster Tools
On GA don’t confuse Webmaster Tools
report and GA reports !

19. RECHECK YOUR
KEYWORDS
• Broad , Exact, Phrase?
• Adwords vs SEO
• Adwords reports
• Ranking
• Keywords and « not provided »
• Universal Search

20. Keywords Search Volume
 Use broad for very specific keywords
 Use phrase for expression and compare with exact  it gives you an idea
of the long tail potential of this expression
 Use Exact for most keywords but keep in mind that 0 does not mean this
keyword is totally useless.

21. Adwords and SEO
 If you don’t properly tag your campaign or link Adwords to GA : your
Adwords keywords will show up in organic search !
 Check your current data and your past data
 Check if you have several Adwords accounts. You can now link several
Adwords to 1 GA account.

22. Adwords Keywords
≠
 Matched Search Query may be one of the most efficient report for
Adwords.
 Check keywords actually searched, and not just the keyword you targeted

23. Keywords ranking
 Ranking in which city?
 Universal ranking or web ranking?
 Who’s ranking before you?
 Is there any Adwords?

24. Keywords ranking
 Good tips on what happens in Google SERP but should not be your SEO
main objective.
 However, ….

25. Not provided : a threat for good SEO
 Up to 50% SEO visits impacted
 It’s a Google Search policy, not a GA : all tools are impacted
 Only way to work around is checking landing pages and … check the
ranking

26. Universal Search in GA
 Everything is merged into one keyword report. Whether you come from
Images, Maps, News, Shopping …
 Filters can be used for news.gg / shopping.gg
 No filters possible for integrated universal search (except for images)
 Universal search merged in Webmaster Tools too…

27. BEYOND YOUR WEBSITE
1. Referral
2. Number of backlinks
3. PageRank
4. Alexa and alii

28. Referral on GA
 You don’t have parameters of the referral url !
 Can be very annoying
 Work around with a filter « exact referral »

29. PageRank
 Toolbar PageRank is not the actual PageRank
 No frequent update
 Not inline with ranking or link quality

30. Number of backlinks
 Number of backlinks is quite useless
 Number of domain is a little more clever
 Quick change can be due to tools update rather than actual changes
 Try to measure backlinks quality rather than focusing on quantity

31. Beware of Alexa and tools like that
 Some interesting data for big websites, but don’t rely on it too much if you
have less than 500K visits a month
 Don’t install Alexa toolbar on your computer !!!

32. If we still have more time
Other common mistakes
• GA code only on some pages
• No tracking in your e-mail
• Your office IP not excluded
• Your GA code twice
• Goal configuration
• « useless » Goals
• Goals counted twice

33.  Référencement Naturel
 Ergonomie
 WebAnalytics
 Audit
 Intervention
 Formation
MERCI
Ressources :
woptimo.com
sebastien@woptimo.com
@smonnier @woptimo