Three questions for budget holders to ask every month, week or day about the performance of their search marketing

Through their experience, search marketing specialists know intuitively the questions to ask to review and improve the contribution of search marketing to an organisation. But what if you"€™re a business owner or marketer where search marketing is only a (small) part of what you do? Which questions should you be asking and where do look in your web analytics to find the answers?

Our compilation of top-level questions is intended to give you a framework of questions to ask yourself or colleagues or agencies who are managing search engine marketing.

Your review frequency will depend on the importance of search to your business. But you'll want to review the time-series or trends through time of the KPIs we suggest  these over a period of at least 3 months to see changes in performance. This is the type of report you should produce to review effectiveness over time - fairly stable performance in this case:

For each question we also give you an ideas of dashboard KPIs you could use to review performance and some pointers for where you can look to in your web analytics to find the answers. As always, we illustrate this with Google Analytics, the most popular analytics tool.

This is a high-level review, so it looks at search overall, without drilling down into much detail about paid and natural search. We"€™ve designed the questions so they work both for a first time audit and a more regular weekly or monthly review to keep tabs on your performance.

Onto the questions...

Search contribution to visits and goals.

Question 1. How much value is search marketing contributing overall to our organisation?

By value, we mean the revenue generated through leads and sales or alternatively savings created through online service or document downloads.

KPIs:
 Volume: n, % Visits, Goals or Ecommerce Transactions referred by search
 Value: £, $ Value referred by search (of course this should be compared against costs of search programmes also)
 Efficiency: Index of 100 Search volume or value divided by all visit volume or value. An index is used to compare performance of search and other channels. If it"€™s higher than 100 then this is referring more value

Where to find out in Google Analytics?

The best place to find out the volumes and value is in the [Traffic Sources, Search Engines] report where it"€™s broken down by type of search engine.

Until you know where to find them, the value is a little hidden within Google Analytics "€“ see the tabs for Goals and Ecommerce dashboards to determine value.

Paid vs natural search marketing mix.

Question 2. Does the proportion of paid and natural search fit with our search marketing strategy?

If your strategy is to invest in both types of search marketing, you should check whether the value you"€™re generating from each of paid and natural is consistent with your investment.

For example, if paid search accounts for 70% of your referrers, but you are investing a fair amount in SEO, then it may be that your SEO effectiveness needs reviewing

KPIs:
 Volume: n, % Visits, Goals or Ecommerce Transactions referred by search broken down by paid and natural search
 Value: £, $, % Value referred by each type of search
 Efficiency: Index of 100 Search volume or value divided by all visit volume or value. An index is used to compare performance of search and other channels. If it"€™s higher than 100 then this is referring more value.

Where to find out in Google Analytics?

You can see the paid vs natural search marketing mix several ways in [Traffic Sources, Search Engines] report where it"€™s broken down by type of search engine.

Our recommended techniques:

1. Select Paid or Non Paid hyperlinks above the table. The problem is, this doesn"€™t give you the types of search side-by-side. There are a couple of alternatives to help.

2. Apply an Advanced Segment for paid and natural search from the Advanced Segments selector, Top Right. This shows you a breakdown in each row of the report although annoyingly, it doesn"€™t give you a percentage of each. For us, this is the best option since it allow you to see trends in the chart at the top and display Visits, Revenue or Transactions, so you can see the revenue. This is the example shown at the top of this post.

3. Apply the pivot table option (select the grid icon and then chose medium) to show a separate column for paid and natural).

If you chose the Ecommerce tab (if relevant) you can see visits, transactions or revenue, but again you can"€™t see percentages. You also can"€™t readily compare the segments on a graph.

Branded and non-branded search mix.

Question 3. Are we attracting sufficient branded and non-branded search visits?

Of course it's relatively easy to attract visits through a search containing your brand name - that's the way Google works. So it's essential to report on the volume, value and quality of non-branded search traffic if you want to see the value your getting from search marketing

Anyone who has ever reviewed the keywords attracting visitors to a site will have seen that brand search terms usually dominate, often accounting for more than 50% of search related visits for well-known brands.

Every site has associated brands, but to paraphrase Morrisey, some brands are biggger than others. For these, isolating brand search is essential if you"€™re serious about using search to create incremental business i.e. create awareness and sales from new customers.

It follows that it"€™s futile to try to review and improve search engine marketing without taking brand phrases into account, but that"€™s the default for the less than savvy. For marketers, reviewing their analytics it"€™s not so easy to understand since the analytics tool doesn"€™t readily isolate brand and non-brand phrases.

KPIs:

 Volume: n, % Visits, Goals or Ecommerce Transactions referred by search broken down by branded and non-branded search for natural and paid search.
 Value: £, $, % Value referred by each type of search
 Efficiency: Index of 100 Search volume or value divided by all visit volume or value. An index is used to compare performance of search and other channels. If it"€™s higher than 100 then this is referring more value.

Where to find out in Google Analytics?

This is more tricky to find since it requires you to create a custom Advanced segment containing the brand names. Here are some instructions I've written on reporting brand and non-brand search in Google Analytics.

Other questions?

Of course, there are other more detailed questions that you will need to ask to audit your search marketing further depending on your type of business and the importance of search to your business.

For example, what is the breakdown of search traffic by different countries, different product categories or different search engines. It"€™s also important to have a view on your percentage share of audience using a search gap analysis or a search delivery vs demand ratio as Zaaz refer to it.  More on this in a later post.