Blog and News > lead-generation > Using Analytics to Find High-Value Targets
Using Analytics to Find High-Value Targets
If you are committed to increasing your search ROI, then it is important that you focus on finding high-value targets. Those targets are the ones that allow you to build engagement and improve your website's performance in general - things such as having fresh, relevant content, a high quality score and highly optimized content and marketing.
There are numerous tools on the market that can help you to build up a profile of what sort of variables are impacting your ranking and your website’s engagement, but most of these tools have one major weakness in that they do not offer much context for the information they provide. They show you figures, but they do not link those figures with the results they are generating, so creating a forecast based on the outcome of finding those high-value targets is difficult.
##Speculating Based on Closed Algorithms To be fair, the third-party tool developers don’t have a lot to work with. Google’s algorithms are a closed black box, and Facebook’s Edge Rank is not really that much more open, so the tool developers will never be able to do much more than provide a best guess in their analytics tools - but with some creative reverse engineering the developers can offer some interesting and valuable insights.
##Many Signals, Many Outcomes The Searchmetrics Ranking Factors are a great starting point for building a detailed profile of how your brand is seen online. By breaking down the on-page signals, link signals, business signals and social signals, you can learn how your brand is perceived right now and identify weaknesses in that branding. From there, you can plan out the next step of your marketing campaigns.
The more data you have to work with, the better the results will be, and the more accurate any forecasts will be. If you have been using Google Analytics or some similar tool throughout the lifespan of your website, then you will most likely have several years’ worth of data that you can look back through and use to generate high-value target insights. Using third-party tools such as Chartio, you can look back at your analytics data and generate charts for all the major metrics, presenting the information in a way that makes sense to you. If you want a more detailed breakdown, collect additional data with UserReport, and combine the datasets to get in-depth insights into your audience.
Tim.
