SEO Analytics – We are still in the dark ages!

Though the tools for analytics are getting better every day, it’s still very difficult to determine traffic patterns of algorithmic visitors. Yes, you can easily identify the keywords that brought them to your site. But what really happened to these users when they got to your site? Did they just fall off? Did they buy anything?

Sure, you can add tracking tags to your pages, but most of the cheap of free analytics packages do a terrible job of walking you through the site. What did they click on? If you have multiple links to the same product, how can you tell if they clicked on one or the other?

The common answer is to apply a tracking ID onto the URL, but this will seriously affect your rankings. So far, one of the best ways to track which link was clicked is to add an “On Click” JavaScript reporting method. Yes, this is a royal pain to implement, but it can save you hours of trying to figure out if that new nav widget is working. Otherwise you could try some sort of pixel location based tracking, which is what the fancy expensive analytics programs use.

But how much is analytics worth to a company? To give you an idea, most large sites spend millions of dollars a year developing their own tracking systems. Imagine if you had a million visitors a day and where paying on impression to Web Side Story? You would be paying them 2 million a month just to see where people are going. I would rather operate the site blindly than continue paying that ridicules rate.


Bottom line, there is an incredible opportunity for a REAL analytics tool to come out. Someone please make one!