Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

Google Analytics’ addition of advanced segments allows for nearly limitless slicing and dicing of data. But if you’re not an experienced hand with analytics, you probably don’t have time to fuss with it to learn EVERYTHING that can be done with the tool, you just need to know how to get some real value out of it quickly and easily. With that in mind, here’s a quick tip.

Whether you’re starting out a new SEO campaign, or have been working on one for some time, it’s always valuable to segment your organic traffic to see who’s coming in via branded terms (your company name, or the brand names of your products and services) versus more general terms. Most likely, you rank out well for your branded terms, but a significant value of SEO is to create awareness and capture potential customers who are not yet aware of your brand name(s). Using Google Analytics, you can set up a filter to continually track your non-branded traffic, and this is a great metric to look at to see if you are getting some tangible benefit from your SEO work as far as engaging new potential customers. Ideally, you want this number to grow over time.

Here’s what you need to do :

1. Open the advanced segments tab (in the upper right corner)
2. Click on “create an advanced segment”
3. Under Dimensions (in green) click on “traffic sources” and drag the “keyword” tab into the Dimension or Metric rectangle into the ghosted box in the middle of the screen
4. For the value, add your most common branded keyword.  For us, we could do this in one easy keyword “Netvantage“, you may have to add multiple “or” statements for your different brands, so try to be broad but be sure not to add something that will exclude general searches
5. In the “Condition” tab for each, select “Does not contain” and then give your segment a name and  select test to make sure that you’ve set things up properly.  If you see a significantly lower number of visitors in your test segment, you’ve probably done things right.

Armed with this data you can see if your organic traffic, and your SEO campaign, are bringing potential new customers to the table, or engaging those who are already well aware of your business.