CxFocus

Tag: generic keywords

  • How Multi-channel Funnels Give You More Insight Than Ever Before

    Screenshot: SEO Keyword Grouping GA Multi Channel FunnelsUpdated: March 2012

    Multi-channel Funnel Reports in Google Analytics bring us a whole new depth of understanding to how people come to web sites over the course of several visits.

    Now we can see how some channels are more valuable than we thought up to now. They’re helping make sales which are being credited to something else.

    And there’s a bonus: we can also start working with our SEO keywords and other sources of traffic with a level of control which was previously only available for paid advertising and other campaigns.

    In real time. Retrospectively. With no pre-configuration effort (so not like campaigns, then).

    The most stunning of these reports, in my opinion, is the Top Conversion Paths report. For the first time ever it shows the history of a series of visits.

    What’s more, it groups them by channel so that you can see the most common sequence of routes to the site. For example: social, followed by search, followed by email.

    What’s even more, you can create your own custom groupings which means that you can start working with your organic search keywords in groups, like ‘head terms’ and ‘long tail’ or ‘brand’ and ‘generic’, just as you would with paid search. Or you could group your social sites according to different types, or separate different classes of referring sites, and so on.

    The standard groupings include things like:

    • ‘Paid Search’ — PPC advertising
    • ‘Display’ — banners etc
    • ‘Other advertising’ – other paid advertising
    • ‘Organic search’ — unpaid search visits
    • ‘Social’ — Facebook, Twitter and a long list of other social sites (take a look)
    • ‘Referral’ — referred visits
    • ‘Email’ – visits where the medium has been tagged as ’email’ (exact)

    This allows for a very powerful summarised view of the pattern of visits like this:

    Screenshot: Google Analytics Top Conversion Paths report

    But this default view only scratches the surface of what you can do with these reports.

    The real power lies in the fact that you can create your own custom groups. The interface for doing this is great and you can (should!) use the basic groupings as a template to get you started.

    The first thing I would do is to split those ‘Paid Advertising’ and ‘Organic Search’ groups down so that you can separate searches for your brand keywords from generic searches for more general terms. Those are two hugely different types of search.

    In order to get new customers you need to be able to clearly understand the steps which someone takes from doing a generic search for something you supply through to the point where they know about you and your brand.

    At this point I should pause and thank Matt Trimmer at iVantage who pointed out that Custom Channel Groupings has the facility for doing exactly what we need.

    Here’s an example of what such a report looks like. This is much more revealing than the default version.

    Screenshot: Separate Brand and Generic Search Groups in Top Conversion Paths

    Suddenly it’s obvious that most of the search visits are from people who already know about the brand. Generic search doesn’t appear until much lower down the list.

    The Custom Channel Groupings interface makes it very easy to copy and then edit the basic group configuration.

    The slowest part of the process is working out what your brand keyword variations are. There are full instructions in an earlier article on How to Start Working with Brand Keywords in Google Analytics

    Once you have your list of keywords it’s all point and click from then on. This 6 minute video shows you what to do:

    Separating brand from generic search is the first thing I would do with these reports. But the potential to go further is huge. This approach means that you can start working with groups of unpaid keywords in the same way as you do with paid keywords. For example, you can start breaking those generic search terms down into ‘head’ and ‘long tail’ groups.

    Things to Watch Out For with Multi-channel Funnels

    • You have to have goals or ecommerce configured for these reports to work
    • The default view takes all goals into consideration. I think it’s better to be selective about which goals you are reporting on, particularly if you have many micro-conversion goals set up. For most ecommerce sites, I would tend to consider the ecommerce transactions on their own and then look at key micro-conversions separately. It stands to reason that you might get a series of micro-conversion visits before a final transaction visit, so you need to keep them separate.
    • These reports only work with goals configured and they only show visits with goals. But goals could include non-bounce visits if you so wished.
    • Experiment with the drop down menu which allows you to choose whether to see all the visits, even if they only have one step, or more than 2, and so on. The ‘more than’ options are the most interesting when you are looking for patterns. But don’t treat those as the default or you risk missing the fact that only some visits have any history at all.

    That last point is an absolutely critical one. The history of multiple visits is based on cookies. People now use multiple devices to visit sites and some systems also delete cookies, which means that many real-life returning visitors are counted as new visits by Google Analytics and all cookie-based systems. So what we have here is a sample. These reports provide much more insight than we have had up to this point. We can now see the history of a series of visits. But it’s not the complete picture: this is great for assessing relative numbers  and trends, but the actual numbers should only be treated as indications.

    Resources Relating to Multi-channel Funnels

    Here’s a beginner’s introduction video from Google:

    There’s a more serious one here: http://youtu.be/rZ2RbGsuy3U [Opens in new tab]

    [Other good sources are appearing all over the place at the moment, so I will continue to update this list.]

    Updates

    • [March 2012] Google have introduced new standard channel groupings in Google Analytics. I think it’s wise to take a look at the actual definitions (start to create a new custom set based on the standard definitions, but don’t save). You may find that some of them won’t work for you. For example I work with clients who use several variations of medium for their email campaigns, such as ’emails’, so the standard exact match for ’email’ is no good. A ‘contains’ match would be better for them. Here’s the official guide to the standard Google Analytics Channel Group definitions.
    • [November 2011] The introduction of secure search by Google means that a growing proportion of organic search visits do not have any keyword information. These will show as ‘Not Provided’ in your keyword reports. Since you do not know whether these searches were for ‘Brand’ or ‘Generic / Non-Brand’ terms, it now makes sense to add a third organic search Channel Group for ‘Not Provided’.

  • How to start working with brand keywords in Google Analytics

    Wordcloud showing brand keywords
    Separating your ‘Brand’ searches from ‘Generic’ searches will help you measure and improve your customer acquisition and retention programs.

    Consistency is important here if you are to make and track changes over time. So this article explains the starting point for using this information in a systematic way in Google Analytics.

    As a bonus, the process itself may also reveal a hidden ‘long tail’ of Brand keyword variations which you did not know you had.

    What are ‘Brand’ Keywords

    Brand keywords are the words which people use to search on Google (or other search engines) when they are specifically trying to find your company’s site or products.

    The obvious examples are the name of your company, your brand, or the actual address of your web site.

    Plenty of people enter web site addresses into Google instead of typing the address into their browser. This is perfectly sensible behaviour. Google will automatically take care of typing mistakes. And these days Google’s “Instant Search” will probably bring up the correct result after you’ve typed the first few letters. So it’s a quick and easy way of getting to a site.

    This form of searching is often called “navigational search”.

    The less obvious examples are when someone searches for a product name or other word which is so closely associated with you that it is as specific to you as your actual brand or company name.

    Why Brand Keywords are different

    When someone uses a brand keyword to search for your site it is obvious that they already at least know your name.

    Their intention is also fairly clear. It’s reasonable to assume that they wanted to find your site: they searched for your brand and clicked on a link to your site.

    You cannot assume that all these visitors have been to your site before (unless GA shows them as a returning visitor). Their awareness may have been created by off-line experiences or promotions or other forms of on-line activity.

    But it’s also common for Brand searches to be used by people who are relatively new to you, but have conducted some earlier Generic searches while in reseach mode. Brand search can indicate someone who is well down the bigger sales funnel and is close to becoming a customer, as well as existing and loyal customers.

    The key point about brand keywords is that they indicate that the visitor already knew of your company to some extent. You would expect a different pattern of behavior compared to visits which began with a non-brand or ‘generic’ search.

    A very specific example of the difference is that you would expect to see much stronger performance from paid search and also better ecommerce conversion rates from both paid and organic Brand search. The paid search click through rates, cost per click and return on advertising spend are likely to be much better than Generic search and so they should be managed and reported on separately.

    Which are better, ‘Brand’ or ‘Generic’ visits?

    This is a classic “it depends” question!

    If you get a lot of visits starting with a Brand search then you could take this as an indication that people are conscious of your brand. That’s wonderful: your name is in people’s minds and they are searching for you. This is a great indication of ‘Brand Awareness’ and you may well want to track this. This is very valuable information if you’re doing a lot of off-line promotion or on-line social marketing, both of which may be building awareness without actual clicks to the site.

    If you get a lot of visits starting with a Generic search then that indicates that your site is probably ranking well in the search engines for those terms and that your site’s title fields and descriptions are attractive enough for people to click through to your site. That’s also wonderful: it means you might be able to acquire new customers who have not yet heard of your brand.

    So the answer is, indeed, “it depends”. More of both types of visit would be very welcome, of course.

    In my experience of working with medium sized ecommerce sites operated by multi-channel retailers with significant catalogue and high street businesses, it’s common to see a lot of Brand search and not so much Generic search. So in these cases I think it’s more encouraging to see an increase in Generic search.

    But if your brand is not so well established, and you do not have such powerful off-line promotional channels, you might be more interested in seeing the level of Brand search going up.

    How to use inline filters to build a Brand Keyword list

    The starting place for this process is the normal Google Analytics ‘Keywords’ report in the ‘Traffic Sources’ area.

    When you first load this report, the chances are that you will see variations of your obvious brand terms filling the top part of the table.

    But the aim of this process is to also identify the many variations on your brand terms which may be in use alongside the obvious ones.

    So I recommend increasing the date range to make sure you have a decent representative sample. It’s also a good idea to increase the number of rows being displayed in the table so that you are able to scan a good number of keywords.

    Screen shot showing where to find inline filter in Google Analytics v4

    You need to build a list of words which can be used in a filter to match all your brand terms. The best way of doing this is to use the ‘inline filter’ at the bottom of the keyword table.

    At the time of writing, the ‘Advanced’ inline filter function only allows you to build up filter patterns which contain a series of ‘and’ matches. This is unlike the similar interface for ‘Advanced Segments’ which allows for ‘or’ matches as well. So, although it’s reasonable to bet that at some point the Advanced Inline filter will also allow for ‘or’, right now you have to use the old method.

    The old (current) method is to build up lists using the ‘pipe’ symbol: ‘|’, which is treated as ‘or’ by the system. This symbol appears as the shifted ‘\’ key on most keyboards, but its location varies. It’s bottom left on my PC and over on the right near the ‘return’ on my Mac.

    The process is to start with the first most obvious keyword variations such as

    ‘brand’ and, for example, things like ‘mybrand’, or ‘my-unique-product-name’

    which would be represented by

    brand|mybrand|my-unique-product-name

    • Start by filtering the keywords so that they ‘include’ only words which match
    • Check that nothing which shouldn’t appear is in there
    • Then switch to ‘exclude’ those words
    • Look through the new list and find other examples which are actually brand terms
    • Add them to the list with | in between each one
    • Switch back to ‘include’ view
    • Check that nothing which shouldn’t appear is in there
    • Toggle back again
    • Repeat until you feel you’ve got the main list

    This process is much easier to show than to describe in print. So this video may make it easier for you to understand:

    Once you understand the process you will probably find that you can shorten your list by editing it down to versions of the keywords which match more variations in one go. But be careful when doing this in case you ‘catch’ more than you want.

    Once you’ve build up the list, make a permanent copy of it which you can cut and paste whenever you need it. It’s a very important list and you will be able to use it again and again in many different ways.

    Ideas for using your Brand Keyword list

    Once you’ve created your list of Brand Keywords you can use it to gain a much better and consistent understanding of these two key groups of search visitors: those who already know of you and the generic searchers.

    Examples of places where you can use this list in Google Analytics include:

    • Custom Segments: one for Brand search, the other for Generic Search
    • Segmented Profiles: use ‘Include’ filters based on your list to create profiles showing only Brand search visits and only Generic search visits. (Hint: this last one can be a real eye-opener and provide a frightening glimpse of how your site performs for people who are not already familiar with your company.)
    • Rolled-up Reports: use advanced filters in an extra ‘Rolled Up’ or ‘Summarized’ profile to overwrite all the actual keywords which match your Brand keyword list with something like ‘a Brand Search’. This can allow you to keep the volume of Brand search in mind but also pay more attention to the detail of Generic search. Without this kind of rolling-up, the Generic terms can easily get lost in the crowd of Brand keywords.
    • Multi-Channel Funnel Custom Channel Groups: I’ve written a specific article about how to work with your brand keywords in Google Analytics Multi-channel Reports.

    Resources Relating to Using Brand Keywords