Back to Basics: Organic vs. Paid Search Detection

I often hear from clients con­cerned that their organic and paid search traf­fic isn’t adding up. These clients will exhaust mul­ti­ple resources try­ing to fig­ure out the prob­lem caus­ing the dis­crep­ancy. How­ever, the issue is typ­i­cally due to one sim­ple prob­lem: improper usage of paid search cam­paign tag­ging.

To bet­ter under­stand this issue, it’s help­ful to give some back­ground on how Omni­ture inter­prets search engine traf­fic. Search detec­tion in Site­Cat­a­lyst relies pri­mar­ily on the refer­ring URL, which is passed into Site­Cat­a­lyst on each page view. If the refer­rer matches a search engine with its cor­re­spond­ing key­word query para­me­ter (e.g. “http://​www​.google​.com/​s​e​a​r​c​h​?​q​=​w​e​b​+​a​n​a​l​y​t​ics”), then the refer­rer and key­word are prop­erly classified.

Because the refer­ring URL is the same for both paid and organic click-throughs, all search engine traf­fic is clas­si­fied as organic traf­fic, unless the paid search land­ing page URL is tagged with a cam­paign track­ing iden­ti­fier. When a paid search cam­paign is not tagged, or the paid search detec­tion fil­ters in Site­Cat­a­lyst are not setup prop­erly, search engine traf­fic is not seg­mented cor­rectly. As a result, organic and paid search traf­fic num­bers will not be accurate.

Improper report­ing of search traf­fic can cause major prob­lems for exe­cu­tion, plan­ning, and bud­get­ing of your search mar­ket­ing pro­grams. This can often lead to the mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion of large (some­times multi-million dol­lar) paid search cam­paign bud­gets. For this rea­son, paid search should be tagged and tracked like any other cam­paign. For more details on gen­eral cam­paign track­ing see Adam “Omni_man” Greco’s recent post about the value of cam­paign track­ing and how to track them effec­tively in SiteCatalyst.

Tag­ging your paid search cam­paigns involves just a few steps:

• Step 1: Cre­ate paid search iden­ti­fier: Decide on a scal­able track­ing iden­ti­fier that web ana­lysts and search mar­keters can both agree upon. The sim­pler the track­ing code the better:
  • Exam­ple: http://​www​.your​do​main​.com?kwid=wid­gets

• In the exam­ple above, the “kwid” query string para­me­ter will be used to iden­tify paid search referrals.

• Step 2: Setup the paid search detec­tion fil­ter
  • Log in to the Omni­ture Suite.
  • Click Admin > Report Suites
  • Select the desired report suite.
  • Click Edit Set­tings.
  • Select Gen­eral.
  • Click Paid Search Detec­tion. Once in this sec­tion you can setup paid search detec­tion rules with your des­ig­nated query string identifier.

• Step 3: Deploy paid search track­ing on all des­ti­na­tion URLs: Once you’ve decided on a paid search iden­ti­fier and set them up prop­erly in Site­Cat­a­lyst, you need to deploy these track­ing codes on all of your paid search land­ing pages (des­ti­na­tion URLs):
  • Exam­ples:
    • http://​www​.your​do​main​.com?kwid=wid­gets
    • http://​www​.your​do​main​.com?kwid=cranks
    • http://​www​.your​do​main​.com?kwid=gears

• In this exam­ple, I’ve included the paid search iden­ti­fier, “kwid” fol­lowed by a basic key­word value (i.e. wid­gets, cranks, gears, etc…). This level of track­ing can be expand­ing to include ad groups, text ad ids, etc… The man­ual process of updat­ing des­ti­na­tion URLs is a time-consuming yet worth­while task that ensures Site­Cat­a­lyst can prop­erly iden­tify your paid search traf­fic. It’s impor­tant to note that Search­Cen­ter auto­mates this process by tag­ging all land­ing page URLs for you.

• Step 4: Reg­u­lar follow-up with Search Mar­ket­ing Team: Once you’ve fully deployed your paid search track­ing codes, fre­quently val­i­date their main­te­nance with your search mar­ket­ing team. Many of the prob­lems with inac­cu­rate paid/organic search track­ing come from the mis­man­age­ment or omis­sion of track­ing codes on des­ti­na­tion URLs. This can be eas­ily avoided through reg­u­lar follow-up.

The issue of paid search tag­ging may seem sim­ple and obvi­ous to some, but just one mis­step can lead to major inac­cu­ra­cies in your data. Fol­low these rec­om­men­da­tions and you can sleep soundly know­ing that you are prop­erly track­ing and clas­si­fy­ing your search engine traffic.

As a senior con­sul­tant for Omni­ture Con­sult­ing Ser­vices, Jor­dan LeBaron leads SEO con­sult­ing ser­vices, pro­vid­ing Omni­ture clients guid­ance on site opti­miza­tion strate­gies and lever­ag­ing their web ana­lyt­ics to drive their SEO efforts. Fol­low Jor­dan on Twit­ter or con­nect with him on LinkedIn.