Measuring If Paid Search Is Cannibalizing Natural Search Efforts via Omniture SearchCenter & SiteCatalyst
Normally at most companies, paid search and organic search are broken out and never thought of holistically. While you might be doing really well from your branded terms in the organic rankings and have no need to purchase them via paid search, you or someone else might still be doing it anyway, attempting to own the top positions, causing you to potentially pay for customers you would have had via your organic optimization efforts.
I bet you are wondering how can you find out if this is happening to you or not…
Well you have two options if you have either Omniture SiteCatalyst or Omniture SearchCenter. But no matter which one you have, after reading this blog, you will be able to answer the following key business questions:
- How does my paid strategy incorporate with my organic strategy?
- Should I be paying for certain terms that I rank well in organically or not?
If you have SiteCatalyst, you will need to do a subrelation with natural search engine and natural search keyword. Since Google is king, I tend to pick them for my analysis.
** This can be further analyzed by looking at the Google Search Ranking (which can be added in via javascript code that looks for the cd= parameter within the referring URL string and grabs that value and passes that to an eVar and sProp or via a VISTA rule from Omniture Consulting)
Next you will need to export that data to excel and generate a paid search keyword report by Google (or pull a campaign report with the SAINT classification additions for keyword term). Once you have this in excel you can do an analysis on whether or not it makes sense to purchase and optimize the same terms across both campaigns. Be sure to look not only at ROAS but create a calculated metric for searches by orders, registrations, bookings, etc. to see the ratio for searches to success event for both organic and paid search.
The second option, if you have SearchCenter, is to run one report where the data is housed for both paid and natural search without any need for customization. Just login into SearchCenter and pull up Reporting and then go to Organic to Paid keyword report. This report pulls in both organic and paid keywords into one central area for you to make decisions based on it.
Once this loads up, You will see the keywords bringing in clicks, their paid keyword status, and most importantly, the natural clicks that the keyword brought in and its ROAS. Break down the report to show only natural and then only paid to see where the best ROAS is. Now you get to see if you should be buying that paid keyword within your overall SEM strategy. This is very useful across all of your PPC campaigns and since SearchCenter is looped into all of your search engines, you can quickly activate/deactivate keywords that you need to on the fly.
Written by:
Dorian D. Regester
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