Google Analytics with its robust traffic source tracker provides an excellent tool to analyze traffic from various sources across the internet. Most of the traffic comes from 3 main sources (Direct, Referral, Search Engines). Apart from providing basic stuff like visits, visitors, pageviews, unique visitors you have a lot of facility to perform robust / insightful analysis.
Lets discuss on few important things that GA offers for understanding traffic related data:
A) Search Keywords Organic / Paid
B) Tracking Referral campaigns (Email and other campaigns)
A) Search Keywords Analysis: GA provides separate segmentation on Keywords from Paid search traffic and Organic search traffic from Google.com, provided you integrate Adwords Search campaigns in Google analytics. This is simple nowadays, with ability to simple add a new code directly to your conversion campaigns and activate GA tracking in Adwords interface system
However, for other Search Engines like Yahoo, MSN & smaller search engines you need to specifically differentiate the Paid / Organic separately. The URLs for ad campaigns in other search engines need to be modified to include the source, campaign, term, content, name. This can be done via the URL builder over here http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 . The url then passess the information to the analytics system for effective differentiation of the traffic metrics. This data will be shown along with other paid traffic in your GA console.
For example you need to create URLs for the Yahoo, MSN campaigns. you can do it easily.
- Landing page: www.sample.com/trackingcode
- Variables: Source = Yahoo.com , medium = CPC, Keyword is Example.
- Custom Tracking URL: http://www.sample.com/trackingcode?utm_source=yahoo &utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=example&utm_campaign=tracking%2Burls
This is how you create unique URLs for each of the keywords and place them in the campaigns. The keyword data from urls will be read by the Analytics engine and stores them accordingly for display of the reports. Yahoo also now provides Auto tagging IDs. Using this you do not have to individually create unique URLs for each keyword, but create a single URL for the campaign and the using the IDs, Yahoo system automatically places them directly into the URLs. Before this you need to activate the Auto tagging feature in the Yahoo dashboard.
- New Variables: Term is {OVKey}, content is {OVADID} and campaign is {OVCAMPGID}.
- New Tracking URL: http://www.sample.com/trackingcode?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc &utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}
Similarly this can be done for MSN campaigns and other smaller search engine campaigns.
Comparing Organic & Paid traffic
Create profiles in Google Analytics to separate traffic from Organic results and paid results. This will help monitor your traffic separately in different profiles to view Site Overlay and other reports effectively. One way of separating Organic and Paid traffic is by applying filter in the main analytics settings of your GA account. Create a profile of existing account and include only Organic traffic.
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Select “Include”
Filter Field:Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: google|yahoo|msn
Filter Type: Custom Filter
Select “Include”
Filter Field:Campaign Medium
Filter Pattern: organic
Once you have a profile with SEO traffic, you can track the position of the SEO ranking keyword in the google results. Yes, you can with the help of advance filters and custom filters.
Adwords Search Keywords in Google Analytics (Paid Keywords)
You can track actual search keywords used to drive traffic via Adwords listings inside Google Analytics. Once you integrate Adwords with Analytics. You then need to setup few filters to see keywords and positions in Keyword report.
Filter1: Filter Type –> Custom Type –> Advanced
Field A -> Extract A
Referral –> (\?|&)(q|p|query|kw|searchfor|wd)=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B
Campaign Medium –> cpc|ppc
Output To -> Constructor
Custom Field 1 –> $A3
Make sure all fields are required and they do not need to be case sensitive, then click Finish:
Filter 2
Repeat above steps.
Field A -> Extract A, choose Custom Field 1 <– (.*)
Field B -> Extract B, choose Campaign Term <– (.*)
Output To -> Constructor choose Campaign Term <– $B1, ($A1)
Make sure all fields are required and they do not need to be case sensitive, then click Finish:
You should now be able to see Keywords in brackets against the Adwords keywords. This is the actual keyword searched by the user. Based on this study you can improve your targeting by including some of them in negative list or add more keywords to your existing list.
How can you use this data:
1) Finding Negative Keywords: There could be users who are using some keywords to find your site, however those keywords may be irrelevant. These can provide ideas for negative keywords in Paid Campaigns
2) Keyword research: You can find more keywords which can added directly into Paid campaigns or gain Organic rankings for higher positions.
3) Better Understanding of your Users’ intention. These keywords will give you an idea of what the user expects from your site.
4) Better Optimization of your Organic / Paid Campaigns for increasing relevance and lower costs. You can groups your Ads better and structure campaigns properly.
5) Create unique Ads with targeted messages for each set of common theme keywords with separate campaign and destination URL(page)
6) Combining this data with revenue and ecommerce transaction data you can get data about profitability of the keywords which will help you optimize campaigns for higher profitability by focusing attention on high performance keywords and purging non-profitable keywords.
B) Tracking Referral Campaigns / Email Campaigns in GA
Email campaigns and referral campaigns can be tracked separately in your GA using the URL builder for creating Ad urls. Each email campaign contain the URL
Create a new Source: ExampleEmailContent
Campaign Medium: Email
Campaign Content: AdContentName
Campaign Name: Email Campaign Name
We use this information for identifying a particular email campaign in the Traffic Sources report. It gives a detailed information about the source page, landing page, for each Email.
This way you can now track Email Exit rate, Email Conversion Rate, Email Open Rate, Email Views, Email Click Through, Action After Email Clicks.
Using Email campaign data you can segment the data to view pageviews of your website’s pages. Navigation summary of the pages, Funnel tracking if you have set it up.
How can you use the email campaign data in GA
A) Effectiveness of the Email campaigns
B) Identify which of the email campaigns has more conversions. Therefore focus more effort on similar theme and similar Geography.
C) Behavior of the different users on the website, from different Email campaigns.
Similarly there are many insights that can be derived from this, such as effectiveness of emails based on their engagement on the site for new visitors and returning visitors, based on Average Depth / Visit and many more.