What Is Web Analytics?
Web analytics is the gathering, analysis, and reporting of data about a website, so you can see how the site is performing against the goals you set for it.
The goals come first. Before a report means anything, someone has to decide what the major goals are, which objectives support them, where the calls to action sit, and what the targets are. A dashboard with no goal behind it is just decoration.
Once the goals are set, analytics earns its keep in three ways. It shows how visitors interact with your content, so you stop guessing what they want to read and see. It shows how they reached the site, including which terms brought them, even though Google has made keyword data harder to pull. And it shows whether your guest posts are sending the traffic you expected.
The better SEO software now builds machine learning into its analytics. That can point you toward the visitors with the highest revenue potential, or the ones most ready to convert, which is the part that makes SEO simpler instead of busier.
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