A good URL structure can help your SEO a long way. We often overlook the impact of well-defined URL structure has on tracking your web analytics. A user friendly URL structure not only provides an excellent navigation experience for visitors, but also helps you in tracking them easily using you google analytics platform. Following are some of the areas in google analytics, where, having a good website URL structure helps in drawing more insights.
Accuracy in Tracking Data
Tracking the performance of landing pages and efficiency of the funnel is an important aspect of analyzing web analytics data. A well-defined URL structure can help you in identifying these web pages easily within the google analytics platform. You can easily visualize the behavior of your users on the website, especially when you have huge content on your website. You can also easily analyze the performance of individual sub sections and identify the content that appeals best to your visitors. This becomes even more critical when you are tracking information across multiple subdomains.
Content Grouping
Content grouping allows you to identify the type of content that has a recall value with your visitors and how your visitors are interacting with various types of content. It can also be used to group similar kind of products or services within the analytics platform to draw more specific insights regarding such sub groups of data. By maintaining a website URL structure which is reminiscent with the type of content, you can analyze the performance of various types of content you are posting on your website.
Defining Filters and Advanced Segments
Advanced segmentation and filters a powerful feature of google analytics which allows you to isolate the sub-groups of data. This helps you in analyzing the subsets of your data to know more about their behavior. For example, you are a furniture manufacturer who manufactures indoor furniture, outdoor furniture and storage equipment. By defining a good URL structure you can not only group the content by type of furniture, you can also group all the products relate to specific furniture line. This makes your reporting easier and also help you draw more insights. You can also define advanced segments to analyze the behavior of visitors browsing a specific set of pages.
Analyzing the Site Search
Site search is another powerful feature in google analytics which allows you to track the behavior of your visitors based on the search terms used by visitors to find the content/products they are looking for. Google analytics allows you to define criteria on which the search terms should be picked from the URL. By ensuring that you have a relevant URL structure, you can get accurate information about the search terms used by the visitors. Along with providing you insights about your visitor’s engagement, this can also help you in choosing relevant keywords for your PPC campaigns.
A website’s URL structure should be defined as easily as possible. You should consider constructed your URL structure in a logical way to enhance your user experience and also SEO performance. By avoiding the unnecessary complexity in the URL structure, you can also make more efficient use of your google analytics platform to draw meaningful insights.