In today's Daily Golden Nugget I'm going to examine the fictitious designer name "Fancy Rings" and how it would appear in the Google Webmaster Tools Search Query report, and how to compare that report to the Organic keyword report within Google Analytics.Although I'm using the fictitious designer name "Fancy Rings" all the other numbers mentioned in this Nugget are accurate. For simplicity sake I'm abbreviating Google Analytics as GA and Google Webmaster Tools as GWT. Feel free to follow along in your own accounts.
To get started I'm opening up GA and clicking on the left navigation of Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic to see the report of which organic keywords brought visitors to my site. Within my GWT account I'm opening the Traffic > Search Queries to see which keywords were ranking in Google SERPs for the last 30 days.
To start, I compare both reports to find any keyword that appears on both. For this example I'm using "Fancy Rings" as the keyword found on both. GWT reports 110 impressions for "Fancy Rings" and GA reports 24 visits for "Fancy Rings." In yesterday's Nugget I explained how you should reference these numbers compared to sales, but today I want you to dig a little deeper to see when this keyword was searched and what pages the search engines lead people to.
In GWT I want you to click the outlined star that appears to the immediate left of Fancy Rings. The star will turn yellow. Then, at the top of the report I want you to click on the button for [Filters] to open the filtering options. Within those options I want you to click on the choice for "Starred queries only," then click the [Apply] button.
This will filter out all other keywords except for the Fancy Rings phrase and I have the following results:
12 impressions on March 25
22 impressions on April 4
12 impressions on April 7
That's only 48 impressions while GWT says there should be 110. The other 62 impressions are hidden from the report, probably because of privacy issues.
Looking now at the Organic report in GA, I want you to apply a filter to it. At the top of the keyword list you will notice a form field located next to a small magnifying glass. Type your keyword phrase into that field and click the magnifying glass to activate the filter. In my case I'm typing in "fancy rings."
After applying that filter I now see a total of 5 keyword phrases that matched. The first keyword shows 24 visitors while the other four keyword phrases each show 1 visitor. The plotted chart at the top now shows what days these visitors arrived on the website. I'm specifically interested in the 3 days I previously listed above.
March 25: 12 impressions and 2 visits
April 4: 22 impressions and 2 visits
April 7: 12 impressions and 0 (zero) visits
Remember that GWT didn't show the dates for the other 62 impressions but they would have to match all the other dates that GA is showing us.
By looking at these two filtered reports you should be able to discover patterns that relate to other advertising. On the days when you run advertising through Google AdWords, Bing pay per click, newspaper, radio, TV, and direct mail you should be able to correlate in some way with the search results you see on these reports. Those correlating dates will help you assess how your paid advertising is working.
In the upcoming weeks you might be running an ad for Mother's Day and for a specific designer line of jewelry. Keep reviewing these reports for phrases like "mother's day jewelry" or the designer line you specifically mention in the ads.
Even though your ad has your website shown, people will probably use Google search to find you instead of going directly to your website. It might seem silly, but people use Google search to "navigate" to your website even though they could have typed it directly into the browser. That type of search is actually called a "navigational" search.
In tomorrow's Nugget I'll explain how to use this same GA report to dig a little deeper to show you how the search engines send visitors to your website.
