Ask the Experts Blog
by Gravity on May 20, 2013
Q: I’ve started to notice that a large chunk of my direct traffic is landing on deeper pages. Some of these page URLs are very long. It seems odd these would be direct. Do I have a tracking issue?
A: This is a great question that we’ve been seeing more and more often lately. Your first step is to check whether or not your tracking is working correctly. Follow Google’s instructions in the two links below to make sure there are no problems:
1. Ensure Google Analytics in on all pages, and configured to be practices
2. Check Google Analytics referral information with the Debugger Tool
The Dark Social
Assuming you found no errors in your Google Analytics review, let’s dig into why you’re seeing direct traffic landing on deep pages within your site.
Many people in the SEO industry currently believe that a large chunk of the direct traffic you see in Google Analytics is actually coming from the “Dark Social”, a term coined by The Atlantic editor Alexis Madriga. Boiled down, the Dark Social are places across the internet from which analytics programs cannot track referral data. This includes: email, chat programs, and some mobile applications.
On our own site, yourseoplan.com, Google Analytics shows we had 1,476 Direct visitors for the month of March. But were those visitors really all people who either typed our URL in the browser window or bookmarked our pages with their browsers? Not likely. Thinking in terms of the Dark Social, direct traffic visits actually number only 672, with a little more than half actually coming from referrals that cannot be tracked. Here’s a screenshot showing actual direct traffic vs. dark social traffic:
One way to segment out the Dark Social is to create a segment in your Analytics solution that filters for Direct traffic and excludes the home page. You can click this link to see this segment if you are using Google Analytics. To be more conservative, you can use this advanced segment which will also count any subfolder with 4 characters in it. Neither of these techniques is perfect: they’ll probably overcount your Dark Social visits. If you publish printed marketing materials that display subfolders (such as www.example.com/2013sale) then be sure to exclude those from the Dark Social segment as well.
With your newfound information of the Dark Social traffic, you may have more “social” traffic than you previously thought! More importantly, you’ve gained a better understanding of the true sources of visits to your site.
Ask the Experts Blog
by Gradiva Couzin on May 8, 2013
Q: I just began reading your book SEO: An Hour a Day and am very pleased with the advice found in it. Thank you. My main concern lies with PPC (AdWords), as I’m just starting out my campaign and currently have very little budget. I’m concerned that not every click on my ad will be a sale and, thus, cause me to lose money rather than make a profit. Is there another method I could perhaps attempt before diving right into PPC from the get-go, maybe a “Pay per Sale” option? Or is there another form of PPC I could try that may not put such a strain on my wallet, so to speak?
A: You’re right to assume that not every click will translate into a sale for your paid search campaign. Typical conversion rates (the percent of clicks that “convert” into sales) vary widely from industry to industry, but it would be reasonable to expect a conversion rate for a brand new campaign to be under 5%. (Brad Geddes suggests that 3% is Google’s stated benchmark)
Instead of relying on every click to convert for you, you need to identify a cost per conversion that you can live with, and set your bids accordingly. For example, perhaps you sell hat boxes at $15 apiece, and you are willing to spend $5 on advertising for each sale you get. That translates to much less than $5 per click, because you know that only a fraction of your clicks will convert to a sale. Perhaps $.25 per click would be a reasonable starting point.
I would suggest trying Google’s Conversion Optimizer, which will allow you to set a target cost per acquisition (CPA). But before you can enable Conversion Optimizer, your campaign will need to have conversion tracking in place, and the campaign will need to have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days. Here’s information about Conversion Optimizer: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2471188
When you are starting out with a new paid search campaign, you should expect that there will be a learning curve, which means that your advertising dollars may be less efficient than you’d like them to be, at first. You’ll want to take time to manage your campaign regularly, monitoring bids, tweaking your ad text, your keyword list, and possibly your landing page, until you have reached an acceptable conversion cost.
When you’re getting started, there are no guarantees that you’ll make a profit, so determine what exploratory budget you’re willing to spend, and choose your campaign levels accordingly. Or, in other words, only gamble what you’re willing to lose.
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