How Does Paid Search Affect Visitor Behavior?

Does the suc­cess or fail­ure of your paid and nat­ural search ini­tia­tives cre­ate more ques­tions?  Do you want to under­stand bet­ter how vis­i­tors react to your site enter­ing from exter­nal search?  Do you want to know how to improve your site to take bet­ter advan­tage of the traf­fic you are dri­ving to your site from paid search?  There is no magic bul­let, but I hope to give you the skills to bet­ter under­stand how paid search is affect­ing your vis­i­tor behav­ior, so that you can test dif­fer­ent cre­atives and land­ing pages.

If you are new to Dis­cover, you may won­der, “Where are my Search Key­words – Paid and Search Key­words – Nat­ural reports?”  To get these reports you need to first load the Paid Searches report in Dis­cover, which is found under the Traf­fic Sources menu.  From here we can break down paid or nat­ural by key­word to see our paid or nat­ural keywords.

What is the impact of all my paid search ini­tia­tives on my business?

Please note: If you have set up your paid search to be recorded in the cam­paigns vari­able and you have uti­lized SAINT clas­si­fi­ca­tions to roll up all paid search cam­paigns then you can answer this ques­tion in SiteCatalyst.

1. Drag the Orders and Vis­its met­rics to the Paid Searches report.  Note: you can select any met­ric that you would con­sider a key suc­cess on your site.
2. Cre­ate a cal­cu­lated met­ric for con­ver­sion rate.  In this exam­ple I am going to define it as “Orders / Visit”.  If you are unsure of how to cre­ate a cal­cu­lated met­ric in Dis­cover, you can ref­er­ence sec­tion 6.5 of the Dis­cover User Manual.

This report quickly illus­trates to me the value of my paid search ini­tia­tives in dri­ving a sig­nif­i­cant amount of traf­fic to my site (21% of total vis­its) and con­vert­ing those vis­i­tors.  In fact, I see now that my paid search ini­tia­tives are con­vert­ing vis­i­tors at higher rate than the site aver­age (13.19% vs. 10.35%).  After learn­ing of the stel­lar per­for­mance of paid search, com­pared to other chan­nels, you may ask…

Which of the key­words that I pur­chased are con­vert­ing the highest?

Not every key­word is cre­ated equal and we can get a bet­ter idea of which paid search key­words should receive some TLC, or if cer­tain key­words should just be dropped.

1. Click on the green plus sign next to Paid to break down paid search by search keywords.
2. Sort the Search Key­words by Order by click­ing on the arrow in the sub-column header.
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4. Of the top five key­words (by orders), “jj esquire” is the low­est per­former, con­vert­ing at 12%, com­pared to more generic key­words like “jeans”, which con­verts at 16%.  So now the next ques­tion I have is…

Why is key­word “jj equire” con­vert­ing at a lower rate?

There is a lot of data avail­able to try paint the pic­ture of why one key­word may be under­per­form­ing.  I will try to take you though a log­i­cal flow, but when doing your own analy­sis you may skip a step, if it is not rel­e­vant to your business.

1. My first thought is maybe there is a dif­fer­ence in where vis­i­tors from the “jeans” key­word and the “jj esquire” key­word are land­ing on the site.  This can be uncov­ered by break­ing down both terms by Paths > Pages > Pages Entry.  Tip: If you have more than one row high­lighted when you click on the green plus but­ton to break­down then all the rows high­lighted will breakdown.
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3. In both instances, the major­ity of vis­i­tors (99% and 83%) are land­ing on the Home Page.
4. Are more of the vis­i­tors from the “jj  esquire” key­word exit­ing imme­di­ately from the Home Page than vis­i­tors from the  “jeans” key­word?  To answer this ques­tion, drag over the met­ric Sin­gle Page Vis­its and cre­ate a cal­cu­lated met­ric for Bounce Rate (Sin­gle Page Visits/Entries) to add to the report.
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6. Again, we see sim­i­lar behav­ior from the Home Page for both key­words.  A pos­si­ble next step would be to A/B test changes to the Home Page bet­ter tai­lor the user’s expe­ri­ence.  We know that “jeans” con­verts at a higher rate, so I would con­sider using a ban­ner to high­light jeans to help drive vis­i­tors from generic brand terms like “jj esquire” deeper down the con­ver­sion funnel.

You may still be scratch­ing your head, try­ing to under­stand why there is a dif­fer­ence in con­ver­sion between these two key­words.  Per­haps ask­ing the fol­low­ing ques­tions will lead you to the answer you are yearn­ing for.

Since vis­i­tors are not imme­di­ately leav­ing the site at a sig­nif­i­cantly greater rate, are they not con­vert­ing at a higher rate because they can­not find what they are look­ing for?

1. Cre­ate a Visit seg­ment where Paid Search = Paid and Search Key­word = jj esquire.  Note: the Paid Search and Key­words cri­te­ria need to be defined together in a Page View con­tainer so that we guar­an­tee that “jj esquire” was a paid search.  Then the Page View con­tainer must be nested within the Visit con­tainer so that we can cap­ture vis­i­tor path data in the segment.
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3. Open the Next Page Flow report (Paths > Pages > Next Page Flow) and drag your newly cre­ated seg­ment to the top of the report.
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5. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of vis­i­tors nav­i­gates to the Chil­dren & Toys sec­tion and then to Search.  With this greater insight into vis­i­tor behav­ior, you may want to test dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tions of the Home Page to high­light key areas of inter­est for vis­i­tors enter­ing the site from the paid search term “jj esquire”
6. In con­trast, when vis­i­tors are com­ing from the paid search team “jeans”, a greater per­cent of vis­i­tors nav­i­gate directly to the Wom­ens sec­tion of the site.  This dif­fer­ence in behav­ior form the Home­page for the “jj esquire” and “jeans” terms fur­ther high­light the oppor­tu­nity to increase con­ver­sion by pro­vid­ing a more tar­geted expe­ri­ence, either through land­ing pages or tar­geted offers.
7. 

There are many dif­fer­ent paths for analy­sis to find oppor­tu­ni­ties to opti­mize your paid search and I have only cov­ered a few of them.  You will notice that with my sam­ple data set, the results of the analy­sis did not  yield that golden nugget, excite­ment induc­ing result, but  I hope that this sam­ple analy­sis will inspire you in your paid search opti­miza­tion efforts.  If you have a ques­tion that you would really like be to able to answer, but don’t know how to go about it, feel to post it in the com­ments and we will con­sider it for a follow-up post.