How to Calculate Your SEO ROI Using Google Analytics

You've spent hours learning the most effective SEO tactics, but they won't help if you can't measure them.

Measuring SEO's return on investment (ROI) involves two factors: KPIs (key performance indicators) and the cost of your current SEO campaigns. Tracking these key metrics monthly allows you to fine-tune and optimize your strategy and make informed business decisions.

To get the most out of your money (or time), consider using Google Analytics (GA) to calculate your ROI. With GA, you can identify where your audience is coming from, set goals to stay on track, and incorporate the most compelling keywords to rank better in search engines.

Ways to Calculate Your SEO ROI Using Google Analytics

#1 Page Value

Page value is an important aspect to consider when talking about ROI.

Think of it like money. In America, paper money has been around since the late 1600s as a way of symbolizing the value of something. Instead of barter, people began attaching value to $10 or $100 bills to get an item they needed of equal value.

Page value specifies the average monetary value for all pages viewed during a session during a transaction. Especially for e-commerce sites, it helps to assign a value to non-transactional pages like articles and landing pages. This is helpful to understand because while a blog doesn't necessarily generate revenue, that doesn't mean it doesn't contribute to a customer's future purchase decision.

With lead generation pages, a value can be assigned to an objective like submitting a contact form, so you can more accurately measure whether you're on the right track.

Here is an image showing how page value is calculated according to Google:

In the first example, Page B is visited by the user once before proceeding to Goal D page (assigned a value of $10) and Receipt E page ($100 generated). That means a single pageview of Site B generated $110, giving us its Page Value.

In equation form, this is how it looks:

Page Value for Page B =
Ecommerce Revenue ($100) + Total Target Value ($10)
Unique Pageviews for Page B (1)
= $110

But not all pageviews lead to conversions. That's why it's important to track your data and recalculate your Page Value as more information becomes available. Let's see how this works with the second example.

Here we see two sessions but only one is converted into an e-commerce transaction (session 1). So even if we have two unique pageviews for Page B, the ecommerce revenue stays the same. We can then recalculate our Site B's Page Value using this new information.

Page value for Page B =
ecommerce revenue ($100) + Total Target Value ($10 x 2 sessions)
Unique Pageviews for Page B (2)
= $60

With more sessions and more data, you'll have a better understanding of which pages contribute the most to your site's revenue.

#2 Install eCommerce

If you don't run an e-commerce business, skip this section. For those of you, there is a more advanced feature on Google Analytics that can prove extremely helpful. By enabling ecommerce settings, you can track sales amounts, order counts, checkout locations, and even average order value. This way, you can equate website usage with sales information and better understand which landing pages or campaigns are performing best.

How to enable e-commerce settings

In the left sidebar panel of Google Analytics click ADMIN> in the VIEW panel (rightmost panel) click “Ecommerce Settings”>Enable Ecommerce>Enable Advanced e-commerce reporting.

To complete this, go to where it says “Payment Labeling” under Advanced eCommerce settings and under “funnel steps” enter:

Payment view
Billing Information
Proceed to the payment

Here is an image to better explain these steps:

If you have Shopify or Woocommerce, make sure to set up tracking there, so Google Analytics can communicate and relay this important information to you.

Once you have Ecommerce tracking set up, you will have access to the following data:

Overview of your revenue, eCommerce conversions, transactions, average order value, and more
Product and sales performance
Shopping and payment behavior

These help you better understand how customers are interacting with your website and what products are selling best. In terms of calculating SEO ROI, knowing the steps your customers take and the pages they view before making a purchase will help you analyze the value of individual pages and also the effectiveness of your overall SEO content strategy. your body.

#3 Sales Performance

Again, this is for e-commerce only. The sales performance feature shows sales from all sources and mediums. You can only view data for organic traffic and determine its revenue.

How to see your sales performance

This gives you an overview of your revenue and breakdown of each transaction. Track this over time and see how its trends guide your content strategy.

What is the average transaction amount and what does it tell you about your customers? Does tailoring your copy to upsell or upsell ads affect your revenue per transaction?

Another set of data that helps you calculate SEO ROI and optimize your content strategy is customer shopping behavior.

How to see in-depth customer shopping behavior

At a glance, you can see how effective your buying funnel is – how many sessions continue from one step to the next? How many people have visited your site and either didn't purchase, or added to cart but didn't checkout through your site?

This helps you identify areas that need more SEO attention. It also helps you make predictions about how your revenue could grow by optimizing your copy and implementing SEO to drive organic traffic, giving you a better idea of your ROI. your SEO.

For example, if a high percentage of users visit your page but don't go through the purchase cycle, you may need to edit your copy to include searchable keywords or resonant copy. better with your audience.

Also, keep in mind that while this shows organic sales, you can't determine the keywords that led to that sale, but organic traffic can be an indicator for you. see a comprehensive marketing effort in action. For example, PR can increase brand searches on Google.

Quick tip: you can see which keywords bring the most traffic to your site using Google Search Console and then track navigation history from Google Analytics to connect specific keywords with sales sell.

Overall, to really measure SEO ROI, you need to discover which keywords are working for your business, because although people may be interested in your business due to some advertising Great PR, they may not really care about your services. To really hit this one homepage, choose keywords with purchase intent. That way, you can drive more qualified leads to your website.

#4 Pledge Event

If you don't work on an ecommerce site (hint, hint, my B2B marketers), this is where you'll want to pay attention. Both e-commerce sites and lead generation sites can use interactive events.

Adjust with your sales team to assign a value to the goal based on average order value, average sign-ups, and conversion rate. While useful for e-commerce, these analytics may be most beneficial for lead generation sites that have longer sales cycles and transactions that happen off-site or after multiple sessions ( e.g. B2B SaaS or marketing agency).

Examples of participating events include:

Sign up for newsletter
Submit contact form
Download
Add to cart

How to view your campaign engagement data

Here are pictures for you to follow:

This type of tracking provides more insight into how people are interacting with parts of your website and how engaged they are in different parts of the journey. Use it to set goals for your lead generation and investigate whether your SEO efforts are successful.

Let's say you notice that your website gets a lot of traffic to your services page and a high percentage of those visitors download a case study. This means they are interested in what you have to offer and want to see more case studies from you.

Use ROI calculations to make better strategic decisions for your business

Finally, when using Google Analytics for SEO, you should work on aligning your business goals with specific measurable metrics so you can create a long-term plan for sustainable growth. . It's no secret SEO is a powerful tool for your business, but it's important to include it in an actionable and personalized plan to help keep the ship going.