Analytical Data and Metrics
In all forms of marketing, analytical data and metrics are critical to ensuring a good return on investment. These are the platforms we use, and what each one is actually for.
There are some very good tools and platforms being used within the digital industries to help maximise that return and understand the trends. We use all of the platforms below, and more.
Google Analytics
The starting point for any website owner wanting to understand their traffic. It is free, simple to set up, and delivers stats such as retention times, bounce rates and even the devices being used to visit your online presence.
Google Analytics also represents the data Google is collecting from your website and using for its own algorithm. A must-have for all campaigns. You can look at:
- Sales funnels
- Landing pages
- Bounce rate
- Device used
Search Console
Another must-have digital platform, provided free by Google. It is especially useful for technical SEO: understanding the faults on your site, which pages are live and which are not, indexing and coverage.
Again, this is the information Google sees, and you can connect it to Analytics to form a complete picture.
- Pages indexed
- Removing pages
- Sitemaps
- Mobile indexing
SEMrush
A very popular third-party tool that offers useful information for everyone in the digital industries — data such as keyword comparisons against top-performing competitors, broken internal links, and ideas for better performance.
- Organic search
- Keyword manager
- Backlink audit
- Link building tool
- On-page SEO checker
- Position tracker
Link Building Tools
Ahrefs
A tool for studying the backlink profiles of your competition, so you can reverse-engineer a strategy from what is already working. Ahrefs uses its own DR (domain rating) calculation to help judge the power of a backlink.
Majestic
Another third-party backlink tool, which uses its own trust and citation scoring that aims to mirror how a search engine sees a link. Easy to use, with a limited number of free lookups.
Xenu
A very simple broken-link tool that you download to your PC. It will scan your website, or any other, and then index broken links either by page or by link. Free to download.
Copyscape
Checks for plagiarism, to make sure the content on your site is not copied and is sufficiently unique. There is a legal issue here as well as a ranking one — search engines prefer unique written content. A subscription service, with a few free checks.
Google Ads
When ranking your website is too slow or too expensive, you can go down the pay-per-click route. You pay a set amount every time someone clicks your advert, whether that appears above, beside or below the natural search results. It is also a useful way to identify which search terms actually convert before you commit to earning them organically.
All of this feeds the same job: digital marketing for Las Vegas that you can measure rather than hope about.