Hack43.Measure Organic Search


Hack 43. Measure Organic Search

Many people think that organic or natural search results are impossible to track. Fortunately, if you're careful with how you set up your paid search marketing, you often get organic search tracking for free.

Organic search results are those results from Google, Yahoo!, and the other major search engines that are not pay-per-click advertising. If you do any type of paid search marketing [Hack #42], your site will sometimes appear in both paid and organic result sets, obfuscating the effects of your paid marketing efforts. To resolve this problem and determine accurate return on investment for paid search and site optimization efforts, many marketers attempt to divide search results into distinct groups for paid and organic search. Even if you aren't investing in pay-per-click search, and therefore are certain your search traffic is organic, measuring the effects of that organic traffic is critical.

3.8.1. The Nature of the Problem

For traffic from a search engine, the key to understanding what terms brought visitors to your site is the referring URL information. The challenge when measuring organic search is telling your web measurement application how to differentiate between paid and unpaid placements.

For example, let's say you buy the phrase "fresh fruit" at Google and you're well-ranked in the organic results, so that both results appear on the first page. Regardless of the link a visitor clicks, she arrives at www.bobsfruitsite.com, and the referrer from Google is www.google.com/search?q=fresh+fruit.

"But wait!" you may be thinking to yourself, "I know for a fact that Google AdWords go through a redirect page that counts the click before going onward to the destination site. Surely we can exploit that data?" Tragically no, you cannot. It's correct that Google AdWords do go through a redirect, but the redirect never shows up in the referring URL. A referrer is, by definition [Hack #1], the previous page the user saw, not the previous page requested by the browser.

3.8.2. The Solution

Since the referrer is usually no help, the solution is found in the only other element we can control: the destination URL. By establishing different URLs for your paid listings you're able to differentiate paid from organic results. Changing URLs for organic results is very difficult; it usually requires complex search engine optimization technology and risks your incurring the wrath of the all-powerful search engines. Changing the paid destination URL, on the other hand, is a simple matter, something you're likely already adept at if you've bought any keywords at all.

If you've devised a unique system of landing pages for your paid advertising, you're not completely out of the woods. It is unfortunately difficult to be sure that search engines aren't indexing obscure pages, and therefore some organic clicks may end up on your "paid" landing pages. You need a method that guarantees identification of paid clicks so that your web measurement application can subtract these from the total searches to report on organic searches accurately.

3.8.3. Welcome to the World of Tracking URLs

The simplest solution is to append an identifier to the URLs in your paid listings, creating a tracking URL. You can add a simple parameter likesource=googleinwww.bobsfruitsite.com/index.html?source=google to positively identify the paid placement to your web measurement solution.

URL parameters are usually synonymous with server-side scripting, but don't panicthe parameters you'll use require no web development and work fine on a static web page. The parameter becomes part of the request URL when the advertisement is clicked, but the server simply ignores it. You're only interested in getting something logged that differentiates paid and natural search listings. Furthermore, the parameter needs be present only on the first requestthere is no need to pass it from page to page.

3.8.4. Tell Your Web Measurement Software to Ignore the Paid Search Traffic

All that remains is to tell your web measurement solution how to differentiate paid from unpaid search referrals, allowing the software to subtract the paid traffic from the total, leaving the organic results. Because the number of tracking URLs can be become quite large, the opportunity for user error exists, so many web measurement applications permit tracking URL data to be imported directly to improve accuracy (Figure 3-7).

The remaining task is to divide these referrals into two categories and view them side by side. Some applications perform this division and comparison using visitor segmentation or labeling, others simply make laundry lists of each type of search term, and still others offer complex cross-tabulation associated with organic and paid search terms.

Figure 3-7. ClickTracks tool to import paid campaign data


3.8.5. Now That I Can Tell Them Apart, What Do I Do?

Since paid search marketing is easy to experiment with, you should constantly optimize your keyword mix, isolate those clicks using this technique, and then add them to your organic efforts if they generate good returns. The metrics you'll want to consider when determining how your organic efforts are paying off include many of the standard marketing measurements.

3.8.5.1 Cost-per-click.

In this context, cost-per-click is usually negligible, unless you're working with a search engine optimization (SEO) firm, in which case it becomes one of the key drivers to measure your return on investment. Divide the cost of your organic optimization efforts into the total number of organic clicks you're generating from all search engines to get a high-level cost-per-click. If you're optimizing around specific keywords, you may want to first divide the cost of the efforts by the total number of words you're optimizing for, and then divide by the number of clicks for those keywords (yielding a keyword-specific cost-per-click).

Examining your cost-per-click for organic search also provides a good comparison for your paid search marketing efforts [Hack #42]an important comparison to ensure you're investing your marketing dollars wisely and effectively.

3.8.5.2 Conversion rate by engine and keyword.

Regardless of your business model, you should be associating organic search traffic with conversion events, looking for changes in how this important source of traffic interacts with your site. Hopefully your measurement application supports the generation of this report automatically, allowing you drill down from "all organic search" to "organic search by search engine" to "organic keywords and phrases."

You should also be careful to look at which of your conversion events [Hack #39] organic search terms are driving. Searches for "web analytics newsletter" may yield more sales than newsletter sign-ups, for example.

3.8.5.3 Revenue (or loss) by search engine and keyword.

If your goal is selling products directly online, you should calculate the revenue or loss from your organic search efforts. You'll need to use your web measurement application to isolate the number of visits or visitors arriving via organic search terms, as well as the total revenue these visits have generated. You may want to examine this number both at a high level (e.g., for all organic search and by search engine) and at the keyword level.

3.8.5.4 Lifetime value of visitors from organic search.

While it can take a while to generate a good report on the lifetime value of visitors originally finding you via organic search, this report is important to generating a long-term view of your marketing efforts. Considering that companies spend significantly on paid search marketing, but the wide majority of clicks from search engines still come from organic results, understanding the long-term value of organic search visitors provides great insight into the relationship between paid and "unpaid" search marketing.

In addition to cost-per-click, you may want to build KPIs for cost-per-acquisition and cost-per-conversion [Hack #37] for organic search, again to help you determine the true return on investment for any money you spend optimizing your site.

John Marshall and Eric T. Peterson



    Web Site Measurement Hacks
    Web Site Measurement Hacks: Tips & Tools to Help Optimize Your Online Business
    ISBN: 0596009887
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 157

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