How ppc affects organic and direct convesions and traffic.

[teconsite]

Hi,

I was wondering what percentage of organic conversions is related to ppc previous traffic. I mean, when we evaluate the results of a campaign, we take a look at the cost per conversion in analytics for one specific word.

Lets say that we know that for PPC campaigns we have the following data

Adwords / PPC

Visits: 4500

%conversions rate = 1,15%

Cost per conversion = $10

---

ORGANIC

Visits: 1300

% conversions rate = 2,10%

---

DIRECT

Visitis: 1000

%conversions rate= 2,54%

It is obvious that if I cancel the adwords campaign part of the organic and direct traffic will drop too. So, I was wondering if have you ever done this calculation and if you know what percentage of the organic a direct traffic is related with de ppc campaigns.

I mean... Let's say... "20% of the ppc traffic will come back to the website as organic traffic or direct traffic", or something like that...

Anyone???

Thanks

[JasmineA]

This is definitely a job for Analytics!

Typically you can see how important paid search is to your funnel by looking at the Assisted Conversion Funnel in the Conversions section of Analytics. The closer to 1.0 each channel gets means that it is more important to the completion of that funnel.

Or, here's a quick way I just worked out for you to see how many times PPC touches a converting funnel where Direct is also involved... I don't typically work this out from this direction so my math could be incorrect. You'll want to look to the Multi-Channel Funnel > Top Conversion Paths report, select the conversion metric you are most interested in viewing (we can only see multi-channel paths for conversions with this method), and set the lookback date to 90 days, and choose to list more than 10 instances. I chose all of mine for this experiment.

Download the Top Conversion Paths for your transaction. The sample size I had was 187 different conversion paths. But the client I was viewing also had a "greater than 5 min on site" goal and the number of paths to that was 4113. There are so many ways someone can come to your site, so don't forget to be open minded about the paths that people take!

I filtered this list of 187 paths to just PPC (66) then I used this function {=SUM(LEN(A192:A236)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A192:A236,"Direct","")))/LEN("Direct")}* to find all the instances of Direct within those (317). For this particular conversion type, we see 20.8% of conversion funnels that involved PPC and Direct, 16.8% that involved PPC and Direct and Organic. But this could have been a funnel that was as bizarre as: Social > Email > Direct > Organic > PPC > Email > Direct. It will take a lot more granularity & descriptive funnel naming to pick out what instances of these started or ended with NonBrand or Brand searches.

• This function must be entered as an Array, so instead of just hitting ENTER when you submit it to a cell, you must CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER to get it to work, thus the brackets will show in the cell.

[teconsite]

Thank you so much Jasmine,

your anwser has been very helpful for me.

I have been checking the data in the assisted conversion funnel section and I have an idea now about what is happening with the channels and conversions.

Excellent!