Using ClickTracks to Understand Universal Search

By Dane Christensen

Using ClickTracks to Understand Universal Search
If you do find a significant number of new media types (and presumably not your own) in those search results, or if you just want to get an overall look at the keywords' long tail, it's time to break out ClickTracks' handy-dandy labeling wizard.  Following is a step-by-step process for getting an overall look at how your organic searches have been affected by Universal Search. There are actually different steps depending on if you are running PPC campaigns on Google.  Find the situation that describes your dataset best.

Hint: You'll create a few labels, so you may want to hold off on analyzing each label by un-checking the “Re-analyze immediately” box on the final wizard screen and just analyze them all at once. 

If you do not run any PPC campaigns with Google:

Step 1: Identify your Organic visitors who came from Google

• Go into Advanced Labels and create a label for the criteria "Referred from any search engine".
• Do a "Matches exactly" type match, and select "http://google/search" in the dropdown list. These are your organic visitors from Google.
• We recommend you name this label “Google Organic”.

Step 2: Identify Organic visitors from Google before Universal Search

• Create an advanced label for the criteria “Visited on certain dates”.
• Select a time period preceding the May 16th switch to Universal Search.  This time period could be anywhere from a week to a couple months.  You need to get enough words to serve as a good sample, but you don't want to go so far back into the past that other. factors, such as your SEO efforts, play a big part in the changes. 
• When you get to the Advanced Options screen for this label, combine this with the. “Google Organic” label you created in Step 1 above.

Step 3:  Identify Organic visitors from Google after Universal Search

• Create an advanced label for the criteria “Visited on certain dates”.
• Choose a time frame after the May 16th switch.  Be sure that the number of days is exactly the same as the time frame specified in Step 2.  So if the before time frame was. two weeks, the after time frame should also be two weeks.
• Combine this label with the same “Google Organic” from Step 1.

Step 4: Check out the results

• Check the Number of Visitors metric for both labels in the Site Overview Report.
• Check out the Timeline report for any noticeable change.
• Check out the Search report for keyword level changes.

If you are running PPC campaigns and have set those up in ClickTracks' Campaign Manager:

This process is basically the same as the one above, but you’ll have one extra step after Step 1—call it Step 1b.  This is because once you’ve identified visitors from Google you still don’t know which ones are organic and which are PPC.

Step 1b: Separate the organic visitors from the PPC

• Go into the Quick Labels and create a label for "Traditional search vs. PPC". The label named "Reg. search" is your organic traffic.
• Edit the “Reg.search” label.
• In the Advanced Options screen, combine this label with the label you created in Step 1. 
• Name this label “Google Organic”.

Steps 2, 3 and 4 are just the same as above.

If you are running PPC campaigns that are NOT set up in ClickTracks' Campaign Manager:

If you haven't yet imported your PPC campaigns into ClickTracks' Campaign Manager…well, there's no time like the present.  Using the Auto Import feature in the Campaign Manager makes it easy to do—and if you don't, defining your organic searches will be more involved—a topic beyond the scope of this article.

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Dane Christensen is a Professional Services guru at ClickTracks. Our Professional Services department offers one-on-one interactive sessions to help you with search engine optimization, campaign management, and web analytics. Contact Professional Services or call us 877-773-2249 (+831-621-6380 outside the U.S.).