How to Read Your Analytics - Organic Traffic

[craigh]

How to Read Your Analytics - Part 2 - Content AnalysisTraffic Sources
Google Analytics can be a bit overwhelming at first, and often many users will never get past the basic data set available. I find myself showing people time and again how to access the data that is most relevant to what they are trying to achieve or the providers they are paying thousands of dollars to provide results. This guide is just a quick how-to I can link people to when they are looking to pick apart their analytics a bit more.

Organic Traffic

Organic Traffic is my favorite part of Google Analytics. Organic traffic is the visitors that come to your website, through a search engine, but don't click on one of your paid ads/AdWords. For this reason, this is the data that is especially useful when reporting on the effectiveness of SEO companies, landing page performance and general website content performance. When explaining Organic traffic and going through the reports, I always share a few piece of key information:

1. Google hides your search keywords by default if you are logged into their browser. This leads to a large number of organic results being listed as (not set) or (not provided) - this simply means that we cannot determine what the parameters were, but we can determine that they were organic traffic and that it was not a click on one of our AdWords.

2. Over 50% of organic traffic (guesstimate) tends to be related to the name of the dealership. The best way to filter this out is to use Google's advanced search function - a little known gem hidden away amongst the other settings. Typically, if my client's dealership is Bob's Toyota, I will filter any keyword's that contain "bob" or "bob's" so that we see only organic results that were not from people who knew the dealership name.

If we do this, we get a much better picture of what our "even more natural" organic traffic is like.

3. You can compare your traffic to the previous year. This is especially useful when you are evaluating the effectiveness of some of your long-term strategies (like the SEO company you've been paying for the past 24 months).

I'm going to keep adding to this as I go through things and need to share them with people on my end. I figured someone here may find it useful too.

 

[craigh]

Paid Traffic
When it comes to search traffic, it's essentially broken down into just organic traffic and paid traffic. Although this isn't perfect (some paid traffic sources will show up under referral traffic if Google can't determine that they are paid ads), it's typically a good indicator of the paid visitors you are getting.

The key information to look for in your paid traffic is the information you can't get from your AdWords/advertiser dashboard - things like bounce rate, time on site, average pageviews and landing pages. A good AdWords campaign will not link to your homepage - my personal experience has shown that the most effective AdWords campaigns were tied to individual vehicles or information pages. Although that's a whole other discussion about converting landing pages, the list of landing pages in your Paid Search Traffic is a key information set when reinvesting into these pages. Another number that's always interesting is % New Visits - the average I see is around 70%, indicating that 30% of our paid traffic is paying for return visitors - an interesting number to include in your value proposition for advertising.

Direct Traffic
Direct Traffic is one of the least interesting stats, but it says quite a bit about your online reputation and your digital brand in the "real world". People that know your domain already, and use that domain to reach your site, are considered direct traffic. If you really want to track direct traffic and the influence your marketing is having on getting your domain out there, make sure you also include the organic and paid search traffic that is for your domain - often times people will Google your domain, rather than entering it into the address bar.

Referral Traffic
Referral traffic as a statistic is fairly interesting, but as an indication of SEO strength it's far more useful. One of the key compenents (arguably) is backlinks and the quality of the sites that are linking to your website. An increase in referral traffic will often have long standing impact on the website over the course of its lifetime.

The other way I often find myself using referral traffic is to debunk some of our "garbage" traffic. If we suddenly see a surge in bounce rate, often I will find that it correlates to some referral traffic from a less than ideal source.

 

[Chip Grueter]

Just to add on to this as it's a really important stat to monitor and a good thread:

Google hides your search keywords by default if you are logged into their browser. This leads to a large number of organic results being listed as (not set) or (not provided) - this simply means that we cannot determine what the parameters were

If you link your Analytics account to your Webmaster Tools account you can view your keyword results in Analytics under Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries.

Chip-

 

[craigh]

If you link your Analytics account to your Webmaster Tools account you can view your keyword results in Analytics under Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries.

Hey Chip,
This data is useful when looking at impressions for sure. However, I have (on one sample store) 1300 clicks in that section, but 1700 organic clicks. The missing 400 correlates to the 400 listed in organic as (not set). So, while it will help give a general overview of what your store is showing up as, it doesn't help demystify the (not set) keywords as far as I can tell.