Quite recently I joined the affiliate party. I started a couple of sites to see if I can generate traffic purely from SEO. Quite honestly, I did better then I though. To see how I’m doing and what can I improve I created some reports and I figured to share it with you, maybe, it might come in handy for some of you and maybe I’ll get some suggestions in the comments below.
I’m 100% sure that there are going to be questions such as – “What’s the domain for your site? How can I find your site, etc.”
I’m going to save you the trouble – worldoftablet.com
Obviously it’s a work in progress, but that’s a different blog post, here I just want to show my report.
Google Data Studio – SEO Report – YoY
Since I’m feeling so generous today, I’ll share you the template – https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/fbf8fa3f-5d66-4125-984f-7990c3af1666
Is there something special in this report? No. It’s just a standard report. Nevertheless, let’s go through some small details.
Since it’ s an affiliate niche site, to be more specific – amazon affiliate niche site, I’ve to create the content very useful to the reader and I’ve to improve it month over month otherwise my positions won’t rise. In this report, I like to check just the overall results. For example – sessions – are they growing MoM?
I’m basically focusing on sessions, affiliate clicks, affiliate click conversion rate. Turns out increasing conversion rate month over month isn’t that easy. These metrics give me a small insight into performance, but it’s not what I want. I’m quite often checking the bounce rate and avg. session duration, these are the metrics that help me understand if the UX is growing on the blog.
But the most useful ones are Scroll Depth. I only started to track that at the end of April, so not as much data as I want. I track the percentage of all visitors who read 25% of the post and 75% of the post. This helps me understand if the landing page is missing information or perhaps there’s too much of it. Based purely on this and my gut I adjust the landing pages, and it’s working out quite good for now. We’ll get into it a bit later in a different view because this still is the overall report.
And I also try to keep track of new users vs returning, by countries, by search engines and of course by landing pages.
I’ve 3 views split by year over year and month over month:
Overview – all the traffic, I don’t use it for this specific site, since it’s an affiliate niche site, so the only traffic source is organic.
SEO – all organic traffic from google, bing, yahoo, duckduckgo, etc.
Landing pages – where I check each of my pages individually. We’ll get to that part a bit later.
Google Data Studio – SEO Report – MoM
As you can see – it’s pretty much the same report, the only difference is, that it’s categorized by days and I don’t have to wait till the end of the month to see if my blog is growing or not. If you’re surprised by the growth – so am I. It’s really impressive.
The blog already has more than 30 blog posts, so we won’t see a huge difference in the graph if we make the changes just only for one blog post, right? That’s the reason why I’ve another view, where I’m only checking specific landing page performance, which in my opinion is the most useful view in my report, so without further ado let’s get to it.
Google Data Studio – Landing Page Report – MoM
Before we get into the details, we have to understand that this blog is designed and made purely for one reason – to help the reader pick the best tablet/iPad for his specific needs. So in my personal opinion, I believe these metrics are the most important ones – conversion rate. If a person came into the website and clicked on the Amazon link, that means he found what he was looking for and he’s ready to check the price or check out.
We have to keep in mind that not all of the users are at the end of the funnel, some are just browsing and making an opinion before the final decision. This is why I created the custom metrics – 25% scroll conversion rate and 75% scroll conversion rate. If I see a low conversion rate on these scrolls I try to adjust the article. I make the intro shorter, I do research, maybe there are new tablets in this category and if the user doesn’t see them at the top, he will lose trust for the site.
I had a blog post about 8-inch tablets and I noticed that comparing to other landing pages it has unusual high bounce rate and low avg. session duration and also the low conversion rate on affiliate clicks. I went through the blog post again and noticed that some of the tablets are already outdated and some of them were missing features – GB, RAM, Resolution, Battery life, etc. I edited it, added new products with features a new intro & conclusion, and the positions skyrocketed. I made the last changes at end of April. Today as I write this article it’s May the 7th. It already has more sessions and link clicks than in April.
There’s also quite a boost on a 25% scroll depth conversion rate.
Final Verdict
If you track each of your blog posts independently and try to improve the user’s experience I can almost guarantee you that the positions and traffic will come. At the end of the day, it’s all about how much value can you give with your content and if it’s going to be valued by the readers, google will also move you upwards in the rankings. So focus on creating useful content and analyze it time from time and make sure it’s relevant.
Well, that’s pretty much it.
If you want to get my template you can get it here – https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/fbf8fa3f-5d66-4125-984f-7990c3af1666
I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment below and let me know some other useful custom metrics you are tracking for your affiliate niche sites. Or maybe some different view which gives you a different perspective. I believe my report is far from perfect, but I’m a believer that you can learn a lot more by sharing and teaching than just by studying. So if you have some useful tips to add to this google data studio report – I’m all ears.
Leave a Reply