Organic Search - What Does This Metric Tell Us About Our Site?

Metrics like Organic Search

There are several metrics that paint the picture needed to understand where your traffic is coming from, how much traffic, how long they stay on the page and whether or not they are converting (to a sale, subscription or through other CTAs). Here is a real-world example to review:

Sugarfina and Organic Search

Organic Search is classified as a Channel within the Acquisition portion of the funnel. In a real-world example, Sugarfina, a luxury candy boutique utilizes SEO as one of their primary channels. Utilizing SEM RUSH one can see based on the channel metric, for August 27^th, the top organic search registered at 27,100 visits with the term Sugarfina. When a customer searches for the brand, this renders the company at the top of the search list (as it should) and in the case of Sugarfina, it also renders a Knowledge Graph (see example)  to the right, which generally ‘comes with” a brand search when the brand gains authority in Google’s algorithm.

Does the Organic Search metric assist in improving the ability of a business to accomplish an intended goal?

Yes, understanding the source/channel of Organic Search through web analytics can help facilitate the planning of marketing activities (Tietbohl, 2017). Knowing that the brand is being searched by its brand name indicates that there is an awareness of the brand. Does this metric of 27, 100 visits measure up to the expectations of the company? How does that compare to its overall website traffic for the day? How are those visitors converting and is this a seasonal increase or does it look consistent month-over-month and year-over year?

Analyzing this type of metric can make Internet marketing less risky from a cost perspective (Tietbohl, 2017 it can also help you determine if you’re targeting appropriate keywords when trying to outrank your competition (Patel, 2015).

The Sugarfina site is set up for e-commerce, so it would stand to reason that one of the business objectives or priorities for the site is to sell their candy. To that end, organic search (and PPC) are investments that help to drive traffic to the site, not just for awareness of the brand, but ultimately for conversions. Therefore, understanding how Organic Search is performing, analyzing all of the supporting metrics and ratios and other channels will help improve the ability of the business to accomplish its goal.

Metrics are quantitative measurements. An easy way to keep them” straight” within Google Analytics is to remember that the tables, actually in most Analytics reports, organize dimension values into rows, and metrics into columns. For example, a geo-location could be the “dimension” and the number of sessions originating from that location (or dimension) would be the metric. In other words, if you took a look at Newport Beach (dimension) and saw that there were 500 sessions from that location; 500 is your metric.

References

Hinkis, R. (2015, August 31). Traffic and Engagement Metrics and Their Correlation to Google Rankings - Moz. Retrieved from https://moz.com/blog/traffic-engagement-metrics-their-correlation-to-google-rankings

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web Analytics 2.0. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Patel, N. (July 20). Quantify Your Results: The 14 Most Important SEO Metrics. Retrieved from https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/07/20/quantify-your-results-the-14-most-important-seo-metrics/

Tietbohl, M. (2017). Week 1 Lesson: Intro to Web Analytics and the Basics of Web Analytics. In West Virginia University eCampus. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_88807_1&content_id=_4063421_1&framesetWrapped=true