Measuring the impact of SEO Brand and non-Brand on your sales

Why don’t I see keywords coming from organic traffic?

Originally it was possible in Google Analytics to see the keywords used by visitors coming from Google organic search.

This changed in 2011 when Google decided to make search more secured: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html

Google started to encrypt the data coming from search engines, resulting in the fact that keywords could not be gathered in Google Analytics.

How to qualify my organic traffic?

There is no possibility to gather directly in Google Analytics the information about keywords for a visitor session.

The first way to review this information is to connect your site to Google Search Console (https://www.google.com/). This interface will allow you to review the performance of your site on Google Search engine, such as the keywords that generate impressions and clicks, the landing page url to which users are redirected, the average position of your results…

All these information are really useful to improve your SEO but only give the point of view of the search pages, that means you cannot follow the quality of the visit that resulted and if it generated a transaction.

Fortunately, it is possible to use the data from Google Analytics in order to improve the analysis of your organic search results.

In this method, you need to create a cutom dimension in which you will fill the landing page of a session and a filter that will rewrite your utm campaign with the landing page of the users that arrive from organic search.

It will not give you the exact results of the keywords that were used but you can estimate what kind of keyword was used depending on the landing page.

Once this is done, you just need to define which urls are more likely to be the result of a brand search and which one would be the result of non brand search.

To create a custom dimension that will gather the value of landing page, you need to go in the Admin of Google Analytics, in Property > Custom definitions > Custom dimensions

Click on New custom dimension

Fill the name of the dimension and select the scope “Session”. Finally click on Create. You can give the name you want to the Custom Dimension, the data exchange being based on an identifier.

Once the Custom Dimension has been created, please send us a screenshot of the details of the Custom Dimension, as in the example below. Then, we will be able to validate the configuration and know the ID of the customized Dimension. Here is the result you should get:

In the example above, the ID of the Custom Dimension is “2” as indicated in the “Javascript” block.

You then need to modify your Google Analytics code on your site or in your tag container to push the landing page into the custom dimension.

The code must provide a value to the custom dimension if the user’s previous page domaine name is not your website or a redirect from a site whose referring traffic is ignored, for example your payment system.

In case you have integrated your Google Analytics with gtag, here is the code you can integrate before sending a pageview:

var ignoredDomain = [‘MON_NOM_DE_DOMAINE’,’PAYMENT_DOMAINE’,’IGNORE_DOMAINE’];

if(typeof gtag != “undefined”){

if(typeof document != “undefined” && !taInArrayContain(document.referrer,ignoredDomain)){

gtag(‘set’, ‘dimensionY’, window.location.pathname);

}

}

function taInArrayContain(needle, haystack) {

var length = haystack.length;

for(var i = 0; i < length; i++) {

if(needle.includes(haystack[i])) return true;

}

return false;

}

In our example, dimensionY must be modified by dimension2 to match the dimension created previously.

MY_DOMAIN_NAME must be changed to the domain name of your site.

PAYMENT_DOMAIN must be modified by the domain name of your online payment system.

IGNORE_DOMAIN must be modified by the domain name of the system whose referring traffic is ignored.

To retrieve the landing page from the organic traffic campaign UTM, you must create a filter that will rewrite your campaign UTM for the view you want to use.

To apply such a filter, go in the Admin of Google Analytics of your account, and select “Filters” in the Property column.

Create a new filter as defined below. It will automatically apply in the utm_campaign the value of the landing page url in case the traffic is organic.

To identify organic traffic, set the criterion utm_medium equal organic. With the filter below we will rewrite this value:

You can then save.

Now you’ll be able to divide your organic traffic by landing page.

How to check what are the url for my brand?

In case you are not sure what are the url for brand keywords, you can use Google Webmaster tool.

In the Query tab of the performance view, click on your brand keywords, it will filter all your results on these keywords.

Once it is done, move to the Pages view to see what are the landing pages on which visitors searching for brand keywords are the most redirected.

Note that there will not be an exact list for your brand / non brand traffic. You will get an estimation based on your analysis.

How to analyse ?

Now that you have configured the landing url in utm_campaign you can easily see in Google Analytics the results of your organic traffic with your other campaigns:

To go further, you can also define new channel grouping for your traffic that you will base on the campaign values.

To do so go in the Admin of your Google Analytics account, go in Channel Settings and click on Channel grouping.

Duplicate the default grouping and click to update it.

You can now create one rule for your organic brand that will be based on your landing pages that correspond to your brand keywords. For example:

Then create a rule for non brand that will be applied to all other cases of organic traffic:

Make sure Organic brand rule is the first one applied:

You can now analyse your results for your organic traffic in the category Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels by selecting the grouping you just created: