What’s wrong with tracking rankings and traffic?
Many an SEO agency or Paid Ads consultant use traffic or rankings as their primary reporting method to clients on the performance of their campaigns. This approach, however, is flawed, as these metrics merely support the primary objective for a business, which, in most cases is to get more leads and sales.
Further to this, traffic and rankings are only important, if the keywords that are bringing in this traffic have the correct search intent. What I mean by this is, by looking at the example below, an acupuncturist in Sydney at first glance might want their website to rank for acupuncture, as it has the highest search volume:
In reality, a better choice is to target acupuncture Sydney, for two reasons:
- The search intent of this keyword is in the transactional phase of the buyer’s journey. Ie. People searching using the phrase “Acupuncture Sydney” are far more likely to be searching for your Acupuncture clinic, compared with those searching for just “Acupuncture”, as “Acupuncture is a more informational keyword whose intent is more for people trying to learn about Acupuncture, what is it? How does the process work? etc.
- Ranking for “Acupuncture” will also be extremely difficult as Google knows the search intent. Keywords such as these are called “head” keywords, which are very general in nature and are extremely competitive.
Why are key events a better choice?
What’s more important for your business than focusing on rankings and traffic is to focus on key events (aka conversions). What do I mean by key events? These can be broadly grouped into three main categories:
- e-commerce transactions – for a buyer to actually buy your product
- Lead generation– contact form enquiries/phone calls etc
- Signup– subscribe to your emails/newsletter etc
These metrics are far closer to driving revenue to your business than rankings or traffic. In e-commerce businesses, they actually are directly generating revenue.
What’s the best way to create key events for my website?
Google Analytics (GA4). Google Analytics includes an area called “Key events” which allows you to mark events as key events, based on predefined or custom metrics and pages.
How do I create a key event for my website?
I’ve previously written a more detailed guide on creating goals. The guide assumes you already have GA4 setup and your website is already collecting data. This could be via installing tracking code manually, or using a plugin to that for you in platforms such as WordPress.
TL;DR
Tracking rankings and traffic are good, but tracking key events aka conversions that bring real revenue to your business are much better! traffic and rankings are often subjective, and may or may not contribute to business revenue.