Google's Paid & Organic Report: Understanding Your Web Traffic

The Google Paid and Organic Report can tell you where your marketing dollars are being well spent. Better yet, it can show you places you should be but aren’t and places you are that underperform. Are you taking advantage of it?

Understanding your web traffic provides metrics and information to guide your PPC campaigns, keyword choices, and a map of where your customers are coming from. With Google’s Paid and Organic Report you get information on both organic and paid traffic in a format that enhances the picture of traffic as a whole. All you need to do is hook your Google Webmaster Tools to your AdWords account.

From this report you can find out both the amount of traffic for each channel and the percentage of all traffic each channel brings in. You may find sites and areas from the organic numbers that alert you to fertile fields of sales for an ad campaign. New keywords may become apparent that you haven’t thought of in relation to your business. You can also take a big picture look at traffic overall and what influences it.

What’s In the Report?

This handy report shows you:

Number of clicks on your ads that show up for a particular query. You will also see,

• Ad click through rate
• Ad impressions
• Average cost per click for the ad
• Average ad position

Number of clicks on your site link in non-paid search listings for a particular query. You will also see

• Total number of searches returning pages from your site over a period of time
• Number of clicks on the page links in relation to total search results from above
• Average number of times a page from your site is listed per query
• Average position per query

The report then combines paid and organic to show you a higher level snapshot of your overall web traffic.

• Number of combined clicks from ads and organic search listings
• Total number of searches returning pages from your site combined with the number of ads triggered
• The ratio of clicks to total queries whether the query returned pages from your site of triggered one of your ads

What’s In It For You

A report showing paid and organic listings with the overlap and clues to customer behavior is invaluable in this world of personalization. By seeing both types of results, you can more easily integrate paid search with organic SEO. If you have separate groups handing these activities, this report can help them coordinate campaigns for higher impact. You can strategically use a mix of organic and paid search if you know how each performs and impacts the other. You could even spend less for a lower placement without losing clicks.

Keyword identification is also enhanced. A paid and organic report can help identify additional keywords for your AdWords account and for your SEO efforts. If you see significant traffic for a keyword returning scads of organic results, this may be the time and place for a paid ad. Alternatively you can research keywords that may be costing you money that aren’t as relevant to your audience as you first thought.

Link your Webmaster Tools to your AdWords account and begin collecting this information as soon as possible. Take advantage of the wealth of information Google is offering to help you monitor and improve both paid and organic search. Differentiate yourself from your competitors by learning where you need to be directly from your customers.