Google Analytics - Search Engines

The next report under Traffic Sources is "Search Engines". This is simply a breakdown of your search-referred traffic based on the search engine that they came from, and their respective performance. Note that this report shows you the general search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo!), but does not drill down to regional search metrics, such as google.co.uk vs. google.com. Here is what the default report looks like:

The default view gives you a few useful metrics. For each search engine segment, you can see:

• # of visits
• pages/visit
• Avg. time on site
• % new visits
• bounce rate

While these may not seem like incredibly actionable items, they are certainly useful, as they can help you understand the differing behaviour of different search segments. For example, I can easily see that visitors to my site that arrive through Google spend less time on the site, look at less pages, and have a higher bounce rate. This makes sense, because Google users are accustomed to getting relevant results quickly, and would therefore tend to be more impatient.

Understanding that, you could derive several action items:

1. Examine your Google search traffic. What are people searching for? If they're not staying on the site, it means that it may not be meeting their expectations. What do you need to change on the site to bring it more into line with Googlers' expectations, in order to keep them on the site long enough to convert?
2. Seeing as your MSN/Live traffic has the highest level of engagement with your site, it would make sense to target SEO/PPC campaigns to that search engine. Even though there may be less volume, there would certainly be higher conversion levels, and therefore greater ROI.

What else can you do?

Clicking on a search engine takes you to the keyword report, which I'll discuss in a separate article.

Also, it's interesting that this is one of the only reports in Google Analytics for which I see some value in the different chart styles. Normally I have little use for bar chars (other than copying them into a slide), but on this report the bar charts can give you a much better understand of search engine share than the initial tabular data. While you may have a head for numbers, it's much easier to get the percentages visually.

For example, look at the screen shot above, and tell me quickly what are the relative search traffic shares of Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live. It's not easy, it involves fractions, and nobody like fractions. However, make a quick switch to the bar chart (click the 3rd "Views:" icon"), and voila, it's much simpler!

Where this report becomes useful is when you monitor multiple sites, across various niches/industries. You can begin to understand trends, and see which types of searchers gravitate to the different search engines.

For example, the website being tracked in the screen shots above is a pet hobbyist website. It gets most of its traffic on the weekends and evenings, which is generally people at home. It can be deduced that people at home, or people visiting these types of home/family websites are quite likely to use Yahoo and MSN. In fact, their is half as much traffic from those two engines as there is from Google, that's pretty significant.

Now take a look at the same report from a B2B Technology site:

In this case Google delivers almost 92% of all search traffic to the site. So it's evident that the techie business users are far more likely to use Google, and you should therefore concentrate your search marketing campaigns there.

The last I'll show is from a Travel site:

Again, while in this case Yahoo and MSN/Live may not deliver50% as much as Google, it's still a sizable chunk.

What this means is that the standard search engine market share reports have very little - if any - bearing on how you approach SEO & PPC. Really, the search market share varies widely by industry and website focus, and so you really need to obtain metrics relevant to your own niche, rather than generic, overall percentages.

So you can see, these reports may seem to provide only a few simple metrics, but spending a little time analyzing them can really shape your search marketing efforts!