Google Tracker

Our search engine optimization component focuses on tracking and reporting of Google visits. We built it this way for a two reasons. First (and most important) we did this because Google is the most frequently used search engine. Secondly, we did this because Google is currently the strictest and most aggressive search engine in terms of ranking relevancy. Therefore we feel that by tracking Google results we are providing the best gauge of a site's effectiveness. If you're doing well with Google, you're very likely to be doing well in other search engines. This may not always be true, so we built our system to be able to change or add in other search engines in the future if it becomes necessary.


Our Google tracker tracks individual user sessions that result from clicks on Google search result pages. In other words, whenever someone types a search into Google, and clicks on a result leading to your site, our Google tracker logs the visit, records the phrase used in the Google search, and logs the actual site page the visitor landed on (since most search engine visits do not start with the homepage). We also begin to track that particular user's session, logging every page they go to starting from the page they landed on. Once we start tracking, we track not only their initial session from Google, but also all future sessions whether they come back to the site from Google or not.


Most website traffic reports provide information on search engine visits. They report frequency, number of visits, and even most used phrases. The difference between our tracking system and overall website traffic reports is the depth of individual session tracking. It's one thing to know that there were so many overall visits from Google, and the overall phrases used, it's another to be able to see which specific visits resulted in multiple page views, and exactly which pages were viewed by a particular session, as well as who the most active visitors were. Basically, we pick up by tracking depth where standard logs stop and only report on overall activity.

This is important because when you are making effort to pull in search engine traffic, you ultimately want these hits to result in longer site visits. If someone hits just one page from a search engine and then leaves, that hit was not ultimately very productive. However, if a user hits the site from a search engine and sticks around looking at multiple pages, or better yet, comes back to the site on multiple occasions that would be considered a much more productive visit from a search engine. Likewise, knowing which phrases led people to your site and kept them there, is much more useful information than simply which phrases got them there but did not necessarily keep their interest.

Another benefit of tracking individual user sessions, as opposed to just recording overall stats, is that we have the potential to capture and associate actual user information (email address) if the user ever fills out a form on the site. For example, suppose a user comes to our site from a search engine. Our system assigns that user a numeric ID and begins tracking all of the pages they view. Now let's say I get an email from that user through my contact form. The system appends the users email address (that they just voluntarily supplied) to their previously recorded sessions. Now I can review all their site activity before I respond to the email. I'll already know roughly what they are interested in by looking at what information on the site they've accessed. Of course this is just a side benefit of this system. Its ultimate benefit is that it helps refine your efforts in optimizing site content (especially titles), which we'll expand on next.   next >