Custom Reporting: Analysing your SEO vs PPC

A cool custom report I created in Google Analytics allowed me to analyse how effective both my paid search and my SEO campaigns are performing. It also allows me to highlight keywords that are performing for one source and not the other.

I have worked with many companies and agencies and many are guilty of not integrating their SEM work together. I am sure that everyone is aware that in order to maximise a campaign all marketing channels must work together in an integrated way.

This customized report is a good starting point to help highlight performing keywords and maximise your efforts in order to reach your campaign goals.

Setting up your custom comparison report

Before starting it is very important to think about the goals and the metrics that are used to measure these goals effectively. General metrics will be needed such as visits but if you are an ecommerce site, revenue, orders and customer loyalty maybe the metrics you wish to measure against. If you are a brand (like what I’m working with today) you may want to consider brand awareness metrics like new visits, time on site or bounce rate.

The main idea of this report is that you want to compare PPC traffic against Organic traffic at a keyword level.

In order to set up this up you first need to select the GA profile you wish to compare the sources for and then select Custom Reporting.

Next you will need to select > +New Custom Report

Create this report with the metrics you desire. It is important that you look at metrics that match the KPIs you’re measuring to judge campaign success. The site I am working on has effectively no goals in place, so in the image above we are using bounce rate and Pages/Visit as an indicator of brand awareness but best practice is to have an action based metric like revenue or goal conversion.

Once this report is created, select the two advanced segments you wish to compare.

I have selected “Paid Search Traffic” and “Non-paid Search Traffic”.

These will show us the PPC and Organic traffic based on our chosen metrics at keyword level. A first and interesting place to look would be to review all inbound visits. It is important to understand which keywords are bringing in visits and which are not. Then decide where it is converting traffic and valuable traffic that it may be worth investing marketing budget on. You can also search for high volume, high bouncing pages and begin to understand why customers are leaving that page without conversion. I like this report because the possibilities are endless. I would recommend analysing this report on a monthly basis.