MAXIMIZING YOUR DATA FROM:

PAID & ORGANIC SEARCHCOMBINED SEARCH DIRECT TRAFFIC REFERRAL TRAFFIC

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Paid searchWhy have a budget?

Let’s go through a scenario. Say your Return on Ad Spend is five times greater than what you are spending. So for every one dollar spent, five are earned in revenue. Why have a cap? A solid Return on Ad Spend changes the conversation with your boss from, “Can I spend more money?” to “Can I make you more money?” (Worth noting that there is a point where ROAS has diminishing returns, or inventory or organizational structure may not support the business coming from an uncapped budget—but these are good problems to have that can usually be solved by obtaining new fulfillment partners or adding to your team.)

Paid Search

Organic Search

Combined Search

Direct Traffic

Referral Traffic

ORDERS & PROFIT PER ORDER

Find the right mix of Orders and Profit Per Order. Are you making more money selling a large amount of orders at a smaller profit or selling less orders with a larger profit? If this number is too low think about lowering your Cost Per Click or raise your pricing. Test to see what happens to your Profit Per Order if you raise prices. If you aren’t losing orders or audience then you know you can maintain higher prices.

PROFIT PER CLICK

If this number is low, use similar strategies for increasing your Conversion Rate. Reevaluate: targeting, Cost Per Click prices and keywords.

IMPRESSIONS

In order to increase Impressions, borrow a tactic from the grocery store. Often stores sell milk at a loss in order to gain brand exposure by advertising a rock-bottom price--which keeps their brand top of mind and gets people in the door. Once arrived, consumers you would not have obtained had you not offered the low-priced milk will fill up their carts with plenty of revenue generating items. In Paid Search terms, that may translate to bidding on more generic keywords to increase brand awareness, and writing an ad with an insanely amazing loss-leading offer.

Paid Search is a good way to jumpstart your digital presence, but Organic Search shows strong digital health. Google and Bing algorithms are designed to favor brands that maintain a clear, trustworthy and authoritative brand.

CONTENT MARKETING

The best way to improve Organic Search is through brand awareness and content marketing. Brand awareness strategies come from a multitude of channels including social media, email and advertising. Good content marketing supercharges your Organic Search efforts by targeting keywords and phrases that drive qualified Organic Traffic. Paying a content writer once a week can be more cost effective than raising Paid Search bids.

Organic searchPaid Search

Organic Search

Combined Search

Direct Traffic

Referral Traffic

If you don’t rank well organically, it’s going to be tough for your business to sustain long-term success online. All successful online businesses must build a solid Organic Search foundation. Jed Young, Product Architect of Glew

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CANNIBAL CLICKS

Cannibal Clicks are the wasteful Paid Search clicks that you would have received through Organic Search if your Paid Search ads weren’t showing. You never want to pay for clicks that otherwise would have been free. Yikes! Look at the data surrounding your keywords and try and allocate your budget in areas that need help. Then you can back out of already high performing organic keywords.

BOTH SHOWN RATE

Percentage of time your Paid Search ad and Organic Listing are showing at the same time. These numbers can complement each other, but there is a fine line before those clicks turn cannibal. If the number is high it means brand awareness is high, Organic Search efforts are improving and Paid Search has good coverage. There are times when consumers feel validated clicking on a listing that shows twice. Determine if this is beneficial to your company or if you can save money by turning Paid Search off.

SESSIONS

Vanity number, period. While you want this to be trending upwards, there are other metrics that make a stronger case for success. (No CEO wants to hear about Sessions if it doesn’t translate into Revenue.)

REVENUE PER SESSION

A much stronger indicator of strategy, as you can link this number to Sessions and report it to a CEO. Then they will be glad to hear about the number of Sessions in a given time.

Paid Search

Organic Search

Combined Search

Direct Traffic

Referral Traffic

Combined search

CONVERSION RATE

Pay attention to this metric. A bad Conversion Rate with a high amount of sessions is like inviting the wrong people to your party who eat all of the good appetizers. Not only are they not your target audience but you are paying for them to be there. Fix this by evaluating your targeting methods. Look at your ads, content marketing and paid keywords. If your Conversion Rate is still low compared to Sessions, look at your landing pages. What is discouraging people from sticking around?

AVERAGE ORDER VALUE

Dare we say it, this is a fun metric to work with. If you have a low Average Order Value that means consumers are typing in a specific product, navigating directly to that page and only purchasing those specific items. You need to incentivize them to buy more. Identify who is coming with one thing in mind and either offer them a coupon code if they increase their order size or give free shipping if they spent above X amount. Now they have reason to stay and look around at other products.

Perfecting your Average Order Value introduces complementary sales. A week after a consumer purchases a product, send an email offering a complementary item. By retargeting to a consumer who has proven themselves as a strong lead you will have a huge chance at increasing brand loyalty and lifetime value.

Direct Traffic

Paid Search

Organic Search

Combined Search

Direct Traffic

Referral Traffic

Direct traffic is the unicorn of digital marketing. As soon as your brand is strong enough that people are typing in the URL directly into their search bar, you know your efforts are working.

Since Direct Traffic derives from consumers who purposely seek out a site, Conversion Rates, Average Order Value and Revenue should be high.

If you aren’t seeing strong numbers, consider these situations:

THE WRONG USERS ARE FINDING YOU

A high amount of traffic with low numbers everywhere else indicated users are incorrectly arriving at your site. This means they are entering the URL wrong and leaving quickly. Figure out what is causing the mix-up and work to eliminate the issue.

THE RIGHT USERS ARENT FINDING YOU

If traffic numbers are low, users aren’t able to find your site. Set up redirects from misspelled URLs, brand names or sub-domains. Make sure to tag those links so you can see how many people are making this mistake. If the problem persists you can bid on the negative keywords to still show your site, or write a blog post about the wrong names to show up in Organic Search.

DRASTIC MEASURES

If this problem persists, think about branding to the identity that people most commonly identify with. Why fight an uphill battle when a pivot could hold enormous profit potential?

referral trafficPaid Search

Organic Search

Combined Search

Direct Traffic

Referral Traffic

USE THE PR TEAM

Referral traffic is the perfect project for a PR department to tackle. Reach out to bloggers to become brand ambassadors, send reviewers products so that they will do a review, write a press release that will go on news outlets, or create a referral program where advocates get cash back. Better than all, look for ways to go viral!

STUDY THE TIME FRAME

Since links that other people post will most likely not be tagged, in Glew you can isolate the time frame that a blogger or advocated posted and see how it affects traffic. Studying what tactics work best through isolated date ranges is the best way to figure out strategy behind Referral Traffic.

In April 2012, Google’s Penguin updates took aim to discount erroneous backlinks; and thousands of business were negatively affected. This meant that marketers could no longer game the system, and links referral traffic had to come from a legitimate source. Now Referral Traffic is a challenge that is best undertaken by both Marketing and Public Relations.

(Note links to something on social media is NOT considered Referral Traffic but categorized in Organic Social!)