5 false assumptions about your online traffic
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Analyzing online traffic and making sense of all the data is something digital marketers do every day. After all we need to understand what’s going on in order to grow the business. Sometimes our assumptions are based on past experiences, sometimes we can support them with data, but quite often they are based on pure logic. Are they really? Over the years we’ve worked with numerous clients and learned that some assumptions are proven wrong more often than not.
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5 false assumptions about your online traffic
- 1. 5 FALSE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT YOUR ONLINE TRAFFIC Andraž Štalec
- 3. Where else could you find things like these…
- 4. And these…
- 5. And these…
- 6. It fulfills our lives
- 7. Search query „Nike sneakers“ Ad „Nike sneakers“ Landing page Nike sneakers
- 8. €- €50,000.00 €100,000.00 €150,000.00 €200,000.00 €250,000.00 €300,000.00 €350,000.00 €400,000.00 €450,000.00 €500,000.00 Revenue You achieve great results for your client (or company)
- 9. But then sometimes all this results in totally unexpected results Productbrandsusersaresearchingfor Productbrandsusersarebuying Nike Adidas Salomon Nike Adidas Salomon
- 10. We were so wrong 0% brand stickiness 25% brand stickiness 50% brand stickiness Productbrandsusersaresearchingfor Nike Adidas Salomon Nike Adidas Salomon
- 11. Because we fail to see behind the standard reports. MOST FAILURES ARE NOT EVEN CAUSED BY PPC CHALLENGES, BUT BECAUSE OF BAD ASSUMPTIONS
- 12. IT’S TIME TO DIVE DEEPER AND TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING.
- 13. Brand stickiness report Nike has a brand stickiness of 50 %
- 14. Use this report to …. Sitelink extensions For brands with low stickiness include secondary brands as Sitelink extensions. Dynamic remarketing Promote the products users are actually enggaging with on the website. Estabilsh RLSA On brands that are „stilling“ most of the conusmers from the primary brand. Research low stickiness Do you have enough products on stock? Are your prices compepative?
- 15. But do they? THE MOST LOYAL USERS COME FROM DIRECT TRAFFIC
- 16. It’s quite common to see channels like Paid Search, Organic Search and Email outperforming Direct
- 17. 98,70 % of users! IGNORE CONVERTERS FOCUS ON THE ONES WHO DIDN‘T CONVERT
- 18. Use Session Quality report to deliver more actionable insights
- 19. Use Session Quality report to deliver more actionable insights
- 20. WE ARE CREATURES OF HABIT
- 21. BUT MORE OFTEN THAN TO PRODUCTS AND BRANDS, HABITS ARE CONNECTED TO OUR BEHAVIOR
- 22. 50% 50% 75% 25% 25% Display Organic Search Referral Paid Search Email Direct
- 23. Cross-channel CDJ: First interaction is Direct 100% 40.48% 83.42% 18.31% 17.73% 5.14% 11.74% 4.81% First interaction Assisted interactions Last interaction (Other) Direct Display Email Organic Search Paid Search Referral Social Network
- 24. Check out this blog post to learn how to create these reports: https://www.red-orbit.com/blog/e-commerce-cross-channel-consumer-decision-journey-report
- 25. We’ve seen a decrease in Paid Search revenues of up to 80 %! GENERIC SEARCH IS IN RAPID DECLINE
- 26. Search is behaving strangely FREE FALL Decrease in generic Branded steady BRAND TAKING OVER Decrease in generic Increase in branded GENERICS RULE Increase in generic
- 27. BRANDS AGE. INDUSTRIES CHANGE. MARKETS GET MATURE. EVEN ON SEARCH.
- 28. Market maturity stages and Search https://www.red-orbit.com/blog/the-decline-of-generic-search-and-how-to-save-your-brand
- 29. 12 types of search users Nike sneakersNike sneakers Nike sneakers Nike sneakers Nike sneakers Nike sneakers Nike sneakers Nike sneakers
- 30. Ecommerce performance by User Transactions E-commerce trends 4/2018, Red Orbit 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Users w/ 1 transaction Users w/ 2 transactions Users w/ 3 transactions Users w/ 3+ transactions Transactions Revenue per user
- 31. 12 types of search users https://www.red-orbit.com/blog/12-types-of-google-search-users
- 32. Making an ASS out of U and ME ASSUME
- 33. Users searching for a specific product brand will actually buy that brand Direct traffic brings the most qualified users Once you go Direct you will always go Direct You can define user intent from search query Search is dominated by generic keywords 5 false assumptions about your online traffic
- 34. Get to know the business. It will help you make better decisions. ECOMMERCE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE 1.600 € TRANSACTION S PER MONT 0.33 CUSTOMER LIFETIME 24 MONTHS AVERAGE ORDER VALUE 400 € AVERAGE GROSS MARGIN 50 % CUSTOMERS CUSTOMER ACQUISITION NEW USERS CONVERSION RATE CUSTOMER ACTIVIATON REPEAT RATE CUSTOMER RETENTION CHURN CES CAC MRC
- 35. Establish top level business KPIs and connect your activities to them 2 31 4 5 6 7 CLV CAC Customer profitability score Repeat rate Retention rate AOV CES
- 36. Create dashboards for day-to-day monitoring
- 37. Use a monitoring system to track your organic traffic and correlate it to conversions SEOMonitor.com Keywords Conversions
- 38. Go beyond traffic. Analyze the business.
- 39. Don‘t build reports. Create value. Insights Lessons learned Actions Business impact
- 40. LET‘S GO AND DELIVER SUCCESS
- 41. Thank you 01 02 03 04 Email andraz@red-orbit.com Twitter @andrazstalec LinkedIn Andraz Stalec Web www.red-orbit.com
Editor's Notes
- You analyze users, their behavior and get under their skins. You think like they think. You create compelling ads and design landing pages which reflect user search intent.
- It turns out that quite a large portion of users will actually consider and even buy product from another brand. Of course it all depends on a primary brand they were searching for. Some brands are more “stable” and have higher brand loyalty and higher brand stickiness. Others are not so lucky.
- Start by creating Brand stickiness report to see which brands users acquired by a specific brand are actually buying.
- It also displays the average Session Quality for each channel.
- And you can also drill-down to see the distribution of Session Quality for a specific channel. People are quite often shocked when they find out that majority of Direct traffic has really low Session Quality. Not only that, Direct traffic has usually one of the lowest percent of High Quality Session. That might happen partly because Google Analytics will attribute all sessions from unknown sources to Direct traffic. Secondly, your “loyal” users might have developed a habit of regularly checking your website for new offers. They are visiting your website without clear intention to buy, thus their Session Quality is low.
- We are creatures of habit. Habits help us through our day. They simplify our lives. Once we develop a habit we stick to it. That’s the reason why brands are so eager to build a habit of using their product or services. It’s a golden mine for them. Once you have a habit of buying a specific hair shampoo it’s going to be hard to switch to another brand (remember brand stickiness?).
- Because habits are so closely related to our behavior it’s hard to know which part of user behavior is habitual and which not. Too often we find repeatable patterns in Google Analytics which are really not that.
- I wouldn’t dare to claim that anyone still believes in one-channel-to-rule-them-all user journey (meaning user will always use only one channel to access your website). After all multi-channel and omni-channel concepts have been around for years now. It comes naturally to us that users will access the website over different channels like Facebook, Google, Email, Direct etc.
- Where the shock came, was how many users who start the purchase journey over Direct traffic switch then to other channels. In this case, 60 % of users which started on Direct switched to other channels. At the end 83 % of them finished the transaction again over Direct. Wait! What? You are saying that my loyal users, which know the brand well and are visiting the website often, are actually browsing the web and searching for alternatives on Google? All our research data from lots of different clients and industries show that channel selection is not something habitual. You cannot rely on users to use the same channels all the time. This enforces the idea that you need to be always present on all channels.
- Create Cross-channel consumer decision journey reports to better understand the role of each digital channel better.
- 1. Some clients who have been with us for more than 10 years have been getting fewer and fewer conversions through Paid Search ads. More precisely, generic keywords which used to perform really well and were responsible for large portion of transactions are now delivering just a few percent of transactions. On the other hand, branded keywords have been behaving steadily throughout the time. 2. There are other clients for whom we also noticed a huge drop in conversions from generic keywords, but we were lucky enough that a part of this drop was substituted by an increase in conversions from branded keywords. 3. To complicate the matter even further, we have some clients for whom generic keywords are killing it, easily outperforming branded keywords and dominating Paid Search. At first glance there was no logic behind it. In some cases transactions from generic keywords were rapidly decreasing and branded keywords were increasing, in others just the opposite. And there were numerous cases where the situation was somewhere in between. And to be clear, I’m talking about absolute numbers (not relative to other digital channels like Facebook, direct etc.). What the hell is going on?!
- Each market can be segmented based on its maturity into a few segments (picture above). Each segment has a dominant user base, from Innovators at the beginning to Early and Late Majority at the peak and Laggards at the end. As markets mature, search queries change. Different user bases will use different search terms, not only because they have different characteristics (Innovators tend to be younger and more open to change than Laggards), but mainly because there is nothing there at the beginning. Innovators When new markets form, when new innovations enter the market, people don’t even know what to call them. There is no market leader, there is not even a market. Innovators tend to use a variety of different keywords to describe the same thing. Synonyms and related terms are often used. Generic keywords volumes at this stage are low, while branded searches are close to non-existent. Early Adopters The market is slowly forming leading to industry standards or in our case use of the same keywords to describe the technology or product. As interest in the market grows, generic keyword volumes start to increase. The majority of purchase decisions are still made by researching the market using generic keywords. By the end of this stage, branded search terms start to appear, but are still widely spread between different companies on the market. Early Majority The market is going mainstream and the majority of the public now know about it. The Early Majority is already well educated about the terminology (generic keywords) and will use them in the early stages of the decision journey, replacing them with branded keywords at the purchase stage. Generic keywords volumes start to stagnate, while a real breakout is noticed on branded search terms. Late Majority The market slowly starts to consolidate, which leads to less competition. Brands invest more in brand awareness leading to another change in user behaviour— users start to use branded search early in the decision journey. Leading brands see an increase in branded volumes, while the not-so-fortunate brands will see a huge decline. Generic volumes start to decrease. Laggards Users are well aware about the market leaders and use branded search throughout their decision journey. Generic search queries are rare. Nevertheless, as market starts to close companies see a decrease in branded search volumes.
- As we saw, usage of branded and generic keywords changes through time. Not only that volumes change, users approach their decision journey in a different way. You might think there’s only one type of users on search, but in fact there are 12 types of search users. Wait what? 12 types of search users? We again usually assume that all users searching for a specific keyword are the same. We show them same ad and land them on the same landing page.
- But then this happens:
- On Google Search we can segment users by two dimensions: by which stage of consumer decision journey are they in (Behavioral segments) and by how well they know our brand (Brand familiarity segments). The trick is to crossmatch these segments (which will leave you with 12 highly targeted segments) and adapt your copy, approach and bidding for each one of them. Use these segments to create more targeted custom audience.
- Remember