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Details: Category: Marketing; Published on Thursday, 30 June 2011 19:38; Written by Super User; Hits: 712

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Analytics & Webmaster Tools Track the Impact of Tweets, Likes and +1

These two web-based tools are extremely essential to any site, for it allows you to monitor and track results from your SEO efforts and to diagnose setbacks from your site’s end to further improve your site’s SEO campaign and overall performance.

Google Analytics is a tool that can track your site’s traffic sources, numbers of daily/monthly traffic and activity once visitors have landed on your site. It’s extremely helpful in monitoring site usage as well as in improving your site’s conversions.

Analyzing your current traffic will get you more ideas on how to manipulate them in going to the direction where you want them to be, since the data presented through the various segments of the tool (bounce rates, average time on site, traffic sources, pages and keywords that bring you traffic, etc…) allows you to see where changes or improvements should take place.

Google Webmaster Tools is metrics dashboard that provides an in-depth view of your site’s backend. It mainly shows activities and interactions of the site around the web as seen by Google’s search crawlers. Some of the main features of this tool are as follows:

Allows you to track search queries pertaining to your site’s pages, which includes each query’s average position on SERPs, number of impressions and click through Google’s result pages.
List of domains linking to your site, including the number of links from each site as well as a list of anchor texts used on external links pointing to your site – as fetched by Google’s crawlers.
Keywords significant to your site’s pages.
Number of internal links.
Detects crawl errors for easier diagnostics, crawl stats of the site and provides HTML suggestions in case search crawlers find it difficult to skim through your site.
Allows you to submit your sitemap, RSS feed and generate Robots.txt for better crawl activity.

How Do You Link Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics?

It's a two-step process.

When you first sign into Webmaster Tools, click Manage in the same row as the site you want to link. (If you only have one site, this is pretty easy).

Click Google Analytics profile from the list that appears.
Select the Google Analytics profile you want to link and click Save
It is important to note that this can only be done with sites that have verified to Google. Also, if your site has more than one contact - or verified owner - each owner will need to link their individual Webmaster Tools accounts to their individual Google Analytics profiles.

Google is getting more Social

Analytics & Webmaster Tools Track the Impact of Tweets, Likes and +1

Google Webmaster Tools now has a “+1 Metrics” section, which provides reports on the impact of the +1 Button on search. The new analytics show how +1s affect your website’s clickthrough rate (CTR). It tracks the amount of +1s on a given page, the CTR with +1 annotations and the CTR without +1 annotations. The new tool also graphs out the amount of annotated impressions and annotated clicks your website receives over time.

Google has also added an Activity report and an Audience report to Webmaster Tools. The Activity report displays how many +1s your website’s pages have received. The Audience report displays geographic and demographic data about users that have +1′d your website’s content.

Even more useful is Google’s new Social Plugin Tracking tool for Google Analytics. The tool compares the impact of different types of social actions on your website. It not only tracks +1s, but it also tracks Twitter tweets, Facebook Likes, Facebook Sends and other social actions.

Social Plugin Tracking generates three reports: Social Engagement, Social Actions and Social Pages. Social Engagement tracks behavior changes (time on site, pageviews, bounce rate, etc.) for visits from social plugins. Social Actions tracks the number of social actions users take on your site, and Social Pages compares your pages on the number of social actions they are receiving.

These tools give website owners a great deal more insight into the impact of social on their websites. Tracking social just makes sense, especially as social sites drive more of the web’s traffic. We also suspect that Google also wants to encourage more sites to adopt the +1 Button. Raw data showing that +1s increase web traffic is the most convincing thing Google can provide.