Paid Adwords & free Google traffic
Executive Summary and Article Navigation
- Why measure Adwords vs. organic Google traffic?
- How can I see the difference between paid & organic traffic?
- Traffic sources automatically filtered
- Goal measurement & conversion – who came to what page
- How do visitors from different sources behave?
- Unbiased 3rd-party conversion verification
Everyday your site gets traffic from Google. The problem is how to tell whether the visits are paid adwords clicks or referred from free organic results.
Here are some sample questions:
“How can we tell if google traffic is adwords paid traffic or free organic?”
“Is there a way to split google adwords from google organic traffic and see which visitors clicked on which ads?”
“We would like to separate our statistics to see which customers come from adwords and which from organic results.”
Why measure Google Adwords versus Google organic traffic?
Why would you want to measure adwords against organic traffic?
Because part of the traffic is paid, and part is free. A comparison is necessary, to see how the paid traffic is performing, and if its worth paying for. Are you paying too much, should you invest more money in paid traffic?
Will it really matter if you reduce your budget by $1000 for a month? Keep track of budgets by calculating how they perform.
The quality of traffic is also important. Is there quality difference in paid vs. free traffic?
The quality of paid traffic can be influenced by ad text and search terms. Additional control is available in the form of bids and pricing.
For further reading see article on Choosing Search Terms.
How can I see the difference between paid & organic traffic?
The question is: How much should I be paying for paid traffic?
The answer is that you can see the difference between paid and organic traffic with Opentracker.
With Conversion and ROI reporting all your traffic is automatically sorted by referrer. This is done using URLs.
In Google Adwords when you create an ad you should fill in a Destination URL.
By looking at this Destination URL Opentracker can automatically identify whether the click was paid or organic.
Traffic sources automatically filtered
The conversion sources are automated – a lot of paid and organic traffic is already filtered in Opentracker automatically. We call referrers “sources” because they are traffic sources.
if you would like ROI information per goal, you can add this by creating goals.
Click here to read about seeing All Your Online Advertising in One Report.
Here is an article explaining Conversion and ROI reporting.
Goal measurement – who came to what page
Goal measurement: we can generate a report for any page on your website that shows you all traffic sources per page and the total return-on-investment for any traffic conversion goal.
How do we do this? We combine several pieces of information. If you use Destination URLs we get the cost per click from the URL. Define the pages you want to be conversion goals in the report. Place a line of code in each goal page and Opentracker will do the rest.
How do visitors from different sources behave?
You can see the difference in two ways:
1. By using Conversion goals, you can compare how many people convert from paid adwords traffic versus how many people convert from organic traffic.
2. Individual behavior: because Opentracker is a clickstream analysis software, you can look at the clickstreams of all individual visitors and see how traffic from different sources behaves.
Unbiased 3rd-party verification
What is also good about using Opentracker is that we are an unbiased 3rd-party. That offers two advantages over the adwords and google analytics solutions:
1. You can see traffic sources and roi from all your traffic sources – not just Google
2. As a 3rd-party who does not sell traffic, Opentracker is neutral, i.e, no desired outcome
Traffic sources automatically filtered
The conversion sources are automated – a lot of paid and organic traffic is already filtered in Opentracker automatically. We call referrers “sources” because they are traffic sources.
if you would like ROI information per goal, you can add this by creating goals.
Click here to read about seeing All Your Online Advertising in One Report.
Here is an article explaining Conversion and ROI reporting.
Goal measurement – who came to what page
Goal measurement: we can generate a report for any page on your website that shows you all traffic sources per page and the total return-on-investment for any traffic conversion goal.
How do we do this? We combine several pieces of information. If you use Destination URLs we get the cost per click from the URL. Define the pages you want to be conversion goals in the report. Place a line of code in each goal page and Opentracker will do the rest.
How do visitors from different sources behave?
You can see the difference in two ways:
1. By using Conversion goals, you can compare how many people convert from paid adwords traffic versus how many people convert from organic traffic.
2. Individual behavior: because Opentracker is a clickstream analysis software, you can look at the clickstreams of all individual visitors and see how traffic from different sources behaves.
Unbiased 3rd-party verification
What is also good about using Opentracker is that we are an unbiased 3rd-party. That offers two advantages over the adwords and google analytics solutions:
1. You can see traffic sources and roi from all your traffic sources – not just Google
2. As a 3rd-party who does not sell traffic, Opentracker is neutral, i.e, no desired outcome
