MetricLust

In 2002, Steve Conine and Niraj Shah founded CSN Stores, the parent company of more than 250 standalone websites that sold household items ranging from barstools to stereo racks (Wayfair, 2019). The idea of having standalone e-commerce websites came from carefully analyzing internet search patterns and was deeply rooted in search engine optimization, coming to the conclusion that offering a large selection of a specific item on a website will drive traffic to shoppers looking for that category of item. They managed websites such as AllBarsStools.com, EveryMirror.com, and BedroomFurnitureDirect.com, each offering thousands of selections as well as editorial content on how to pick the right mirror or bar stool, or whatever the specific category the website was selling (Peterson, 2014). Although they saw about 4.8 million customers by 2010 (Peterson, 2014), CSN Stores was having a hard time growing its repeat customer base. The next year, Conine and Shah decided to take the leave an...

These days, every business with an online presence has invested their time and resources into publishing content on their website, optimizing their landing pages to drive conversions, and more. It’s important for these businesses to understand and track the performance of their digital strategy, and ensuring that they are reaching the intended audience. Built With. (2019). For many businesses, Google Analytics is their solution when thinking of a tool that can track new and returning visitors, bounce rates, referral sources, and other metrics. The current consensus shows that Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics platforms out there today- with some sources reporting more than 27 million live websites currently using Google Analytics (see graph on right) (BuiltWith, 2019). The popularity of Google Analytics comes to no surprise, as it provides a powerful suite of tools for businesses any stage, and it is used by big names- of course, even Google itself. There...

Google Analytics is a great resource for any business who owns a website. It provides useful data about the visitors on a website, their activity and behaviors, and trends over time. Google tries to provide multiple metrics for analytics users- with one exception: organic search term report.   Although the report is still available for users to see, an increasing number of results on this report is listed as “not provided”- a result of Google’s decision to encrypt the keyword information in Google Analytics (Modassic Marketing, 2019). This decision was made in October 2011 to protect the privacy of the users and adopt stronger security standards (Google, 2011). Though this was a great move for the user experience and security, this encryption has left holes in the data in the analytics report, leaving marketers to look to other metrics to help them understand their traffic and know the ROI of their SEO strategies. Fortunately for the SEO industry, a modern problem broug...