Organic search traffic stats "leaking" into other channels?

[NappyValleyNet]

Hi Everyone

I have a website and am slowly getting to grips with SEO.

Last week I enabled a new channel in google analytics which was "email" so I could track effectiveness of the weekly emails we send out.

The good news is that a ton of traffic is now being assigned to the email "channel" in GA but my organic search traffic in channels is now down week on week.

That feels odd as my overall traffic to the site is up, week on week.

Does anyone have any experience of new channels  coming on stream and canniballising old ones? Could it be that some of the traffic associated to organic search previously was actually coming from my email, I just didn't know it?

thanks all!

[LoganRay]

Hi,

Google Analytics is pretty good about assigning proper attribution to channels. If you had been sending out emails prior to tagging the links, that traffic was falling under either Direct or (Other).

PPC is the only medium that would cannibalize organic since you can have impressions in both spaces at the same time. The drop in organic traffic could just be the ebb and flow of your business. Since most businesses have seasonality, year over year comparison is  often a better yard stick for performance.

Is there a particular search engine that you can attribute the traffic loss to? Or perhaps a piece of content received more entrances last week simply due to the timeliness of that content?

[Driver72]

Hello,

Completely agree with Logan. He raises a very good point about Google Analytics being good at subcategorising traffic.

There is another potential solution that may be worth considering. It requires looking at the timescale and quality of the traffic that is coming through from email.

Google uses all kinds of things as ranking factors for SEO, including site usability. If email contributes a large amount of traffic to your site, but has a high bounce rate/low pages viewed/reduced time on site, it is possible that these could be negative ranking signals to Google. This would mean that although it could be getting more traffic a page is losing ranking.

I would recommend having a look in Webmaster Tools and, under Search Analytics, have a look at Pages and Position. If you see a decrease then I would suggest looking at the quality of the traffic from email. You could even look at the conversion optimisation of your landing pages.

I would recommend this blog for a fairly in-depth look at ranking factors. If you find you want to look at Conversion Optimisation then there is a fantastic book called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman (if you haven't already read it).

It's always hard to recommend SEO solutions but I hope this helps. If nothing else it should give you somewhere to start.

Cheers,

Luke

[NappyValleyNet]

Thank you - the content timeliness could be an issue.

School results came out two weeks ago and I had assumed that the (large for us) spike in traffic that generated would have "washed" out now but perhaps it's still there...

thank you again

[NappyValleyNet]

Thank you for the response.

Great suggestions on looking at source and the blog - will do that.

thank you again!