Before tearing apart all aspects of a campaign trying to identify the problem, look first at web analytics to see if the percentages of sales from each of your marketing channels are consistent with what you typically experience.  For example, if you normally see that 25% of your online sales come from paid search, 15% from natural search, 25% from direct load, 25% from email and 10% from affiliates,  check to see if the percentages are the same in the week that sales are low as they are in a “normal” week.  In Google Analytics, this information can be found in the Traffic Sources Overview.  In Coremetrics, you can get at this data in the Marketing Channels report.  In Omniture SiteCatalytst, this same information is found in the Traffic Sources Referrer Type Report.

At any time of the year, looking at this data is a great way to benchmark your sales by channel.  By doing this, you are able to easily troubleshoot issues when sales dip for whatever reason.  If the percentage of sales from a particular channel is much lower than normal, look first at that channel to isolate the problem.  If the sales percentages for all channels are about the same as normal but sales are still low, it indicates that business is slow overall. A particularly strong email promotion can throw these percentages out of whack, but normally it is well known that the email was a strong producer, and fairly obvious then that a higher percentage in that channel will lower the percentages in all the others.

Try setting up auto-generated site analytic reporting to regularly and easily keep on top of sales trends.  With extremely high temperatures in the Northeast this holiday week, hopefully consumers are inside sitting at their computers shopping.  Or, they could be sitting under an umbrella on the beach with a tall cold drink… in or day or so, we’ll get a chance to see how July 4^th week, 2010, has performed.

While website owners can’t dictate the specific links to use in their organic listing, Google does provide the ability to disable individual sitelinks from appearing in their organic results.  Rather than disabling questionable or unwanted organic sitelinks blindly, marketers should use web analytics to measure the usage and effectiveness of each link beforehand. Also, Google introduced the option to include sitelinks in paid search listings late last year, which has proven to be very effective for advertisers.  Understanding the performance of organic sitelinks can be helpful in choosing sitelinks to test in your paid search program.

Because sitelinks are organic listings, it’s not possible to add custom tags to these links for direct measurement.  Instead, sitelink activity must be inferred based on the landing page of visits from natural search brand terms.  Entries on your homepage are likely the result of clicks on the main search result link.  Non-homepage entries are most likely the result of clicks on individual sitelinks.

For example, take the screenshot above, which shows how a search for “pm digital” recently appeared on Google.  Clicks on any of these links will be attributed to the natural search term of “pm digital” although the landing page varies depending on the link clicked on.  Measuring the number of visits by landing page is an indication of each sitelink’s popularity.  Also, visitor’s onsite behavior from these various entry points provides a measure of how valuable each of these links are.  Sitelinks with a high bounce rate or low conversion rate could be candidates to be disabled if other, potentially more relevant sitelinks exist.  Keep in mind that some valuable links may naturally have a high bounce rate.  For example, a sitelink for ‘Store Locations’ may provide searchers exactly the information they want in a single pageview.

Because sitelinks often vary by search engine, analyses should be conducted one engine at a time.  Also, search engines adjust sitelinks over time, so it’s best to analyze a recent timeperiod or one where you know which sitelinks were presented to searchers.

Google Analytics makes it very easy to measure sitelink activity using the method outlined above.

1. Start with your Traffic Sources > Search Engines report and drill down into one search engine (e.g., google).
2. Select “non-paid” in the Show list so that data reflects organic search visits only.
3. Drilldown further into your top brand keyword (e.g., “pm digital”).
4. In the resulting Detail report, change the dropdown menu from ‘None’ to ‘Landing Page’ to view data by that dimension (confirm that “non-paid” is still selected in the Show list).

Measuring Organic Sitelinks in Google Analytics (click to enlarge)

The resulting report shows the popularity of each landing page and key traffic metrics associated with those visits.  Ecommerce metrics and goal conversions are also reported for each landing page for assessment and to help determine the potential impact of disabling one of the sitelinks in favor of others.

The same analysis concept outlined above can be applied to other web analytics packages too.  For example, in Coremetrics Analytics, a Key Segment can be created to isolate natural search traffic from a specific engine and keyword.  The Key Segment can then be applied to the Content Categories report to view site entries by landing page.  In Omniture Sitecatalyst, the Data Warehouse tool can be used to create a segment based on natural search traffic for a specific engine and brand keyword(s).  The Data Warehouse report can be constructed to break down visits and other site metrics by Entry Page.

Anthony Avolio is Director of Web Analytics at PM Digital.