Have you asked an online marketer about how their attribution is going lately? Proving their worth to a client? I wager your answer wasn’t exactly positive. Marketers have been talking about this for a while now though, it’s not new. El Señor Rand Fishkin put this up and the first few minutes goes over these conversations over the last few years. Basically, there’s a lot up against a marketer right now, and it’s not showing signs of slowing down, THOUGH, Google didn’t go through with with 3rd party tracking change. That’s sort of in our favor.
But neither of the above is the point we’re gonna get to today. We’re gonna talk about something that your Google Ads account isn’t telling you, and it’s not necessarily due to bad tracking practices.
Shopper Psychology
First, some psychology. Us humans, we’re fickle. We’re known to not make up our minds right away unless there’s a fire under our rear. We search for what’s best, and maybe even debate with ourselves over it. We’ll waffle, go back and forth, testing this water and that, and then eventually, we’ll make our decision, based on what works best for us. Goldilocks y’know?
As we’re making our decision, we catalog our options, and then our best choices, and remember them. This is a survival mechanic at its corest level. This same function would help us remember which berry bushes didn’t make us sick, which animals were easiest to hunt for the meat provided, and which caves were most protected from the elements or warring tribes.
We don’t have to play all these survival games if you have the luxury of being able to read my blog. But we do still have to decide which product out there is the best for us and if we have no experience with another product that suits us, we’re going to look and look and look until we find that Goldilocks match. That match might not be for reasons of habitability or potability, but more modern things we’re accustomed to shopping around for and with: price, quality, reviews, experience. Experience matters too, because people window shop ahead of time, browse with no intent to purchase. If your website is poor, or you have objectively bad product images, or a low review count, that may equate to the modern equivalent of a leaky cave or tainted water to a nomad people of centuries past.
Forget the analogy, and read this: People shop around before they buy. In order to do that, they interact with your business. Moreover, they remember that interaction in case it suits them when it’s decision time.
Misrepresentation from PPC: Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok, ETC
No one’s keeping the secret that ads can be an effective tool at driving traffic to your site, and getting people to buy/call/sign up. If you have experience with ads, you probably have heard the term ‘Conversion Rate’ and if you’re in business in general, that’s a pretty common benchmark or KPI for businesses globally. Ads are often run with a target conversion rate in mind. It has to perform at a specific level of sales/conversions provided for the money spent. This is smart. But, it’s also very very narrowminded.
Take the above psychology and apply it here. People shop around unless their forced to decide, all to find what fits their needs best. That may mean that their first interaction with your business isn’t one where a purchase is made. Marketers are screaming “DUH ISM” at the screen, but I’m getting somewhere, I promise.
That first somewhere I’m leading you to: just because a campaign didn’t provide sales, it doesn’t mean that it didn’t provide sales. 😀
Yes, I said that.
Google ads is as good as your conversion tracking at telling you if some action you deem a conversion happened on the site. BUT, even if your conversion tracking is good, you might not have all the info you need. Google ads is piss poor at showing a customer journey, and because Analytics is coming up here, I’ll just say I’m not terribly impressed there either. But all the data is better than some of the data, and that’s what Analytics will show if you make the wrong move. But, the point, a campaign that was providing traffic, but not sales according to Google Ads, may have had a fantastic impact elsewhere that Ads can’t see.
Direct & Branded Traffic
Direct traffic is a specific category of traffic on Google Analytics. It specifically means users/sessions that have arrived at your site by means of typing in your url and navigating directly. They skipped a search engine, they came right to you. That can be because of a bookmark, or they remembered who you were and typed it in, or they’ve been there before and the browser is making it easy for them to come back through history.
This is the type of traffic that clients dream of getting sufficient amounts of to operate their business without running massive brand awareness campaigns. That’s the life. Building this type of traffic doesn’t come easy, but it’s often among your most desired type of traffic because it’s a good bet they have some brand loyalty already.
Branded traffic is a bit more broad. These are users/sessions that began because they searched something do with your brand or your trademarks. This is a very fluid type of traffic that can be greatly impacted by things like viral social media posts, tv/radio commercials, celebrity mentions, and to make my point, traffic ads.
Branded style searches come in many forms. It doesn’t mean a user searched just ‘Tide Detergent’ or ‘Limited Run Games’ but maybe ‘tablesaw 26″ Black and Decker’ or ‘best practices Greg Gifford.’ Basically, it’s almost anything plus your brand, name, trademark, or official of your company. Doctor’s offices get branded search same as any fast food brand or car manufacturer, and all are beneficial.
Each of the above forms of traffic coming into your site has value beyond the eyes on your product and service, but that’s a discussion for another day. Today the point to make is that each of the above are often unseen, difficult to measure benefits of running traffic focused ads. Benefits that you might not realize you had until it’s too late.
Google Analytics And The Whole Picture
Google ads is far too focused on telling you about sales to tell you about other benefits you might be getting from there. Thus, it’s up to Analytics to start getting you that info. In good ol’ GA4, you have an acquisition report, and it can tell you about your primary sources of traffic. It also can tell you how that traffic behaves once it gets there, like how often they convert, among many many other things. This, Analytics, is the source of the data we’re talking about.
There’s a great chance that if you’ve started running a display campaign, or a Demand Generation campaign, that you saw a rise in the two traffic types mentioned above: direct and maybe moreso, branded traffic. I invite you to look if you know this applies to you, because I’ve barked up this tree a few times now with my own clients, and it’s become all but incontrovertible. Note: There are campaigns that will absorb branded traffic too. Text ads with your brand as a match keyword are not what I’m talking about.
What you need to do now is:
- Correlate the start time of those demand gen, display, or brand awareness style campaigns, and when you saw the rise in traffic. The growth in sessions/users may be gradual and delayed, but there will be a connection.
- Once you’ve determined what your time frames are that apply best, use the compare feature and see if that increase in traffic had a measureable benefit on conversions.
- If it did, then it should only be a little bit of math or extrapolation to put a dollar amount to that traffic.
That info right there arms you A WHOLE LOT better than ads alone will. Listening to ads might have you turn off a campaign due to no results, and before you know it, other traffic types you were taking for granted prior start to dry up. And between us turkeys, these ads are among the cheapest you can run. If your research showed any green, high chance you’re not in the red for the ad spend for it.
Don’t risk it. Turning off a traffic campaign without doing the research in the directly preceding paragraph can devastate a business that didn’t know otherwise.
I’m just not seeing it
That’s ok. If you feel you’re not comfortable enough with Analytics or Ads to know, we can audit this for you, just hit that contact page. If this isn’t an issue of comfort, and you’re not seeing the rise in sessions, then maybe it’s time to recalibrate the targeting of those campaigns. You can hone these to the right people and sites and not pay much more. Also auditable, let’s talk.
