Cohort Analysis

Google has added a basic cohort analysis report to its popular Analytics suite.A cohort is a group of people or subjects who all share some time-bound event, characteristic, or experience. For example, shoppers who visit an ecommerce site for the first time on March 27, 2015 could be said to be a cohort since they have a shared characteristic — they visited for the first time — and the experience was during the same time period, March 27, 2015.

Cohort Analysis

 Cohort analysis is, perhaps, most useful when two or more cohorts are compared. This comparison lets marketers and analysts see the relationship between the two cohorts over time.

 

 The Analytics’ cohort report can be configured around cohort type, cohort size, metric, and date range.

• Cohort type. At the time of writing, the only available cohort type was acquisition date, thus one could look at how folks who visited the site on a particular date behaved over time.
• Cohort size. This report attribute may be set to day, week, or monthIt may be the case that if Google added additional cohort types, it would also expand the list of available cohort sizes to include other sorts of dimensions.
• Metric. This is simply the thing one wants to measure. Presently, metrics include conversions per user, page views per user, sessions per user, user retention, goal completion, conversion, and more.
• Date range. The relative date range for the data to be displayed.

Doing this analysis, we might learn that visitors using desktop computers generally spend more time on site than do visitors on mobile devices and that this effect is even more extreme during the week before any festive.

First, cohort analysis, like all analysis, should begin with a question. Why are sales rising or falling? What is the best time of the month to launch a new ad? How many days before a holiday like Valentine’s Day should we send an email to get the most sales? What is the long-term value of customers who come from our blog?
This initial question should also help define what you will measure in the cohort analysis.
Next, you’ll need to identify the event or characteristic that defines the cohort you want to measure. For now, in Google Analytics, it will have to be acquisition date. If acquisition date won’t do, you’ll need a different way to collection information.A cohort analysis can help identify and clarify business trends.

Understanding your seo needs

Businesses have slowly but surely begun to realize the value of search engine optimization, and consequently, the demand for SEO services has increased. However, it’s important to understand what you hope to gain from an SEO program before you embark on one.

After all, SEO can involve a lot of different things: technical audits, on-page content recommendations, conversion optimization recommendations, blog posts, link building programs, etc. It could also be priced in any number of ways dependent on how many of those things are included and to what extent. You’ll want to make sure that, when scoping out a program or vetting a vendor, you know what it is you should be looking for.

Three important factors include

1. Business Goals

When thinking about any program, your business goals should always come first. In fact, when businesses come to us asking only about traffic and rankings, we try to push them towards what really matters – their overall goals (and, of course, sales)!
As noted above, an SEO program could involve a number of things. By understanding what your overall business goals are, you can determine which SEO services would best fit your needs. Do you want to increase conversions? Build brand or product awareness? Gain visibility locally? Fix a Google penalty? Each of these will require a different SEO strategy.

2. Existing Performance

Another factor that must be considered is the existing performance of your site. When we are assessing potential clients, we look at their analytics data to provide us traffic numbers and conversion numbers over time. We need to understand what we are up against and/or what we have to work with.

Take a look at how your site has performed over the past couple years. Look at traffic trends, conversion trends, and any other pieces of data in analytics that will help you understand what your site needs. This will also help you figure out what type of budget you may have to put together. If you’re fighting a negative trend, you are going to need a more in-depth program.

3. Resource Constraints

Know where you need help. One of my biggest frustrations with any client is when they tell us they have plenty of resources, yet when the program starts, there is suddenly no one there to do what we need them to do.

If you know where you are lacking, you can start to figure out how an SEO provider can fill in the gaps. For example, if you know that you need content on the site but you don’t have the internal resources to create it, you probably need to rely on your SEO vendor.
It also works the opposite way. If your SEO vendor is proposing writing content for you but you have five content writers on staff, you might just need some editorial guidance to ensure your content team is targeting the right topics and keywords to help drive traffic and conversions. A full content creation program is not needed.

Any business who is thinking of engaging in an SEO program should make sure that they have a good understanding of each of these factors going in. It will make the proposal process easier, it’ll help you find a vendor more quickly, and hopefully, it’ll help you create a successful program that helps you hit your business goals.

Must-Have SEO Reports to Meet Today's Search Optimization Challenges

SEO includes many activities, each with its own set of key performance indicators (KPIs). Tracking each KPI separately and then marrying them to see the big picture can seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be – if you have the right reports.

Initial Reports

Generated before an SEO campaign begins, these reports will allow you to measure results later. They can be generated repeatedly.
Keyword Research Reports should contain information that helps to evaluate the SEO budget and the potential cost, including a list of keywords, how many additional visitors the site can get if it ranks in the top 10 for the keywords reported, how difficult it will be to rank in the top 10, and whether it's cost-effective to promote highly competitive keywords.
Competition Analysis Reports will uncover the SEO strategy behind your competitors’ websites. They should tell you which keywords your competitors are promoting, whether it's necessary to target keywords used by competitors but not by you, and from what sites your competitors are getting their links.
Website Audit Reports will cover myriad factors related to on-page optimization. It's important to check these factors against industry standards in order to identify potential trouble points and elements that need to be improved. They should also include website and page statistics, such as PageRank, link popularity, and the number of indexed pages. A good Website Audit Report should provide information on different content-related issues:

• Page titles
• Meta tags
• Keyword density
• HTML formatting tags
• HTML validation errors
• Broken links

Outputs:

• A list of keywords and/or a keyword matrix
• Competitors’ backlink profiles
• A list of suggested improvements to the site

Ongoing Weekly Reports

These reports are used to track the SEO progress. You need them to make sure that the SEO team is heading in the right direction.
Keyword Rankings Reports: It's vital to track keyword rankings regularly to diagnose problems at an early stage. A decline in rankings during several weeks may indicate a problem such as backlinks whose anchors were removed or have been devalued.
It’s also good to compare your current keyword rankings not only against the previous check, but also against the best results ever achieved. You may also align rankings and traffic for the keywords to see if you are getting what you expected.
Competitors' Rankings Reports: Keep an eye on your competition. If an abnormal growth in their rankings is detected, it’s time to look into their backlink profiles and their on-page SEO again to see what they are up to. Then, steal...we mean, borrow...their strategy.
Link-Building Reports: Link-building is the most tedious of all SEO tasks, consuming time and money. To keep your expenditures to the minimum, closely follow your link providers’ activities, whether it’s an in-house link-building team or an outsourced company.
A link-building report should include:

• Link source URL
• Link destination URL
• Anchor text
• Linking page’s PageRank
• Number of external links on each linking page
• Number of backlinks on each linking page

You should also be able to compare these to older reports to see if backlinks are still in place and the backlink pages have not deteriorated.
Outputs:

• Current keyword rankings compared to the previous rank check
• Current competitors’ rankings compared to the previous rank check
• A list of links obtained during the reporting period

Improving your Social Shares

#1 Add Meta Data

Provide meta details as part of your post. Then, when someone shares your content to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+, it will be displayed in the best possible way on each channel.

#2 Make Image Sharing Easy

Create engaging images for your posts and then encourage your website visitors to share them.
Among other functionalities, SumoMe allows you to put social sharing icons on images. Therefore, when someone hovers over an image in your blog post, they will see an option to share on Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter.

#3 Optimize for Mobile

If you check your analytics, you’ll probably find that at least 20% of your traffic comes from a mobile device.Optimize for mobile sharing, so your fans can share on the go.

#4  Create Tweetable Snippets

Add ClickToTweet links to your site, so your visitors can effortlessly share your content via Twitter. Sign in, authorize the app and create a simple tweet: a title, quote, stat or question in the text, along with the article link. Then add the ClickToTweet link to text (or link with Twitter image) to the post. Then when someone is reading the article and is inspired to send it to his or her network, they’ll click to share your pre-populated tweet.

#5 Experiment With Titles

The titles of your blog posts have a huge bearing on the number of shares they get.Write compelling titles that will strongly encourage people to click on your post.

#6 Reshare Content

After you create a new piece of content, come up with a schedule to share it several times, so more of your audience sees it.It’s highly unlikely that 100% of your audience is online when you share a blog post, especially on a platform like Twitter, so the majority of your followers probably won’t see it.

#7 Find the Right Posting Times

The best time to post content depends on multiple factors: the industry, the type of people you’re targeting, the type of content and more.A lot of it comes down to trial and error. Use tools such as Buffer to schedule content for a variety of times. Then look at the analytics to see which times got the best engagement and activity.