Website traffic does not exist in a vacuum. Here’s a simple example: Jack comes to your website on Monday after seeing one of your Paid Search content ads and he likes what he sees. He’s a careful shopper though, so he’s not ready to commit quite yet and leaves the site for the day. He takes some time and does some comparison shopping throughout the week, talks to some of his friends and comes back to your site again after typing your company name into Google and clicking on an organic result. He sees an offer for a 10% off coupon if he signs up for your newsletter, so he does, and then leaves the site again. In a week, he gets an email about a sale you are having, and clicks on a link within the email, finally making a purchase on this, his third visit.
So the big question is – how does this show up in Google Analytics? Does AdWords get any credit for the sale? The simple answer is no. Depending on if you are tracking your emails in Google Analytics (and how you are doing it), you’ll either see a conversion for the email, the organic branded search or even a direct visit. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that at one point AdWords had something to do with the sale? Better yet, wouldn’t you like to know the Campaign, Ad Group and Keyword that was responsible?
Jack’s example is a very common one, and pretty simple in comparison to the way a lot of people use the Internet, so it is important to try and understand the relationships between your different traffic sources.
Still don’t care? Let me give you a real-world example of what can happen if you ignore it:
Case Study: A company that deals in a software product noticed that it was getting what looked like a pretty poor return on Content Network traffic from AdWords (responsible for what Google Analytics reported as roughly 5% of daily revenue). In an attempt to reduce costs, they decided to pause this traffic completely. The result was that almost immediately they noticed a 15-20% drop in daily revenue!
What the heck happened? Well, it turns out a large percentage of that content traffic was coming back as either organic branded traffic or direct traffic. They never bothered to look at the relationship between their content traffic and other traffic sources, and it cost them.
Conversely, by understanding this relationship, they have been able to not only gain back the 15-20% that they lost, but improve the return even further!
So how can you learn from their mistake? Here are a few things you can do, ranging from fairly simple to more complex, to help you grasp the relationship between your marketing sources and mediums: