Looking at your site’s aggregate organic search traffic is a bit like docking a boat without a depth sounder: Sure, you can gauge where you need to go, but you’d be wise to have more details before you head in.
On that same tack, we should have more detail about our overall search traffic before we use it to make decisions. First and foremost, this bucket of attention can be divided into two groups that we need to watch differently: branded and non-branded traffic.
Why segment your branded traffic?
By segmenting your branded and non-branded traffic, you get a clear picture of two important indicators of success: how visitors interact with your brand, and how they find you with generic, non-branded keywords. This information can help you can take action to target the keywords you care about. This split is also a useful metric to educate your organization or client about your brand pervasiveness and overall visibility.
That’s why we’re excited to roll out a new feature today: Branded Keywords. Now you can group your brand-related keywords together and see related branded data in-line with your reports.
What branded and non-branded traffic tells you
Keywords related to your brand tend to show up at the end of the conversion funnel, when visitors are already aware and interested. They’re more specific and unique, often based on company and domain names, key products, and variations/misspellings of those names and products. They aren’t subject to the fluctuations caused by search algorithms in the same way that non-branded keywords are. This makes them useful as indicators of long-term strength and popularity. For that reason, most sites should see a decent portion of traffic coming from brand-related keywords.
With new brand rules, you’ll be able to track that branded traffic clearly, and uncover any problems with branded keywords that aren’t ranking as well as they should be.
Things get really interesting when you remove branded numbers from your search traffic numbers and focus on your non-branded traffic. Now you have an clearer picture of the generic keywords that currently work hardest for you, which ones you should be targeting and are not, and which content is most effective.
A quick cruise through the feature
You can add brand rules for existing campaigns under Overview > Manage Brand Rules. Specify brand-related terms, and we'll filter all keywords that contain those words.
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You can also add brand rules for new campaigns during setup. Once campaign setup is complete, your rules will be applied to any additional keywords you add.
Add or remove individual keywords once rules are set up. At any time, you can label individual keywords as branded or exclude one from the “branded” filter under Overview > Manage Keywords.
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If your campaign is hooked to Google Analytics, you’ll see your historical traffic data split into branded and non-branded metrics.
You can get better insight into how people arrive at your site with in-depth metrics on top ten search sources, landing pages, and nonpaid keywords, including PPV, bounce rate, time on site, and more.
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See traffic data for brand-related campaign keywords when you filter branded keywords in your ranking report.
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More options for managing your keywords include improved list filters, the ability to view all keywords in the list, and a new label filter for adding keywords.
And there’s more coming in the new year! You’ll see .PDF and .CSV reports added for traffic data. We’ll also start showing you your top keywords that send you traffic, so you can have the option to start tracking them.
Please let us know what you think or if you find something you don't expect to see. You can comment to this post or email [email protected]. As always, we love to hear your feedback!
Great update! With so many things like social and offline maarketing affecting brand search volume, it's imperative we seperate them for reporting to our clients.
I've been tracking branded traffic in Excel for quite some time. Easy formula to use:
=IF(ISNUMBER(FIND("beginning of brand keyword",A2)),"Brand", "Acquisition")
If the brand is Walgreens, I use something like "Walg" to capture any misspellings. Probably a good tactic to use in this update as well.
Congrats Karen. I know you and the team worked hard to release this feature.
A lot of webmasters think - "But I don't have a brand. How does this help me?"
For better or worse, Google loves brands. Folks searching for your site by name is a sign of authority, trust and engagement. If you don't have a brand, now is a good time to transform yourself into one.
Even if you start from zero, seeing 1 or 2 additional brand searches per week indicates you are "sticking" with your audience.
Define your brand. Track your success.
Best. New. SEOmoz feature... EVER.
Distinguishing between brand and non-brand keywords is the foundation of a strategic SEO program. It's the first step toward figuring out where your program is strong/weak and where your competitors are headed.
Way to go, Rand & Co.!
Absolutely awesome feature. Go Moz!
Now this is something REALLY cool! Amazing featureKudos to the SEOMoz team!
Good one, have been splitting up brand and generic traffic/ conversions for a long time in omniture and analytics by hand =)
A good addition SEOmoz =)
I agree with you James. This is indeed a great addition to SEOMOZ.
Thanks Karen and team for this new feature.
And as Cyrus said, we should go out there and start/continue to build/define our brand and track it with this very cool new feature.
Thanks agains guys for this!
Nice feature. I use Advanced segments in GA to monitor this currently. Many thanks.
Keep the features coming! This is the reason I stay a paying subscriber. Although advanced segmentation can be done in GA, having it available in SEOmoz too is great. If you want some real KICK ASS training, do what I did and get certified by Avinash at Market Motive Web Analytics.
Fantastic feature,
Almost all KPIs for SEO from GA is here!
Hope seomoz will implement GA goals integration in 2012)
Congrats. It seems to be an excellant feature.
Thank you so much for adding this. I'm stoked!
This is fantasitc. We offer comprehensive marketing strategies that incorpoate a lot more than SEO - we do a ton with social media, video, content, etc so clearly a big part of the overall marketing strategy is BRANDING. Often times clients are looking at their GA and wondering why their top converting traffic is coming from variations of their brand name ("shouldn't it be from all of these keywords we are targeting instead?")... HELLO Mr. Client - website traffic from your brand is the BEST traffic you can get - this means your brand is becoming popular enough for people to actually go to Google looking for YOU specifically instead of just randomly finding you through a generic keyword search. If they are looking for you, they are already interested - so you have a much higher chance of converting the traffic that comes in from your brand.
Excited to try out this feature! Thanks for your hard work!
Great update. I had only been taking a generic view of my brand keywords in GA. Now I will start comparing in seomoz to get a better handle on the bigger picture. Looking forward to next year roll out with top traffic keywords. Keep up the greart work:)
What about GA "term not provided"? Or am I missing something?
Hi LNSales--
Rand answered this one further up the list (thanks, Rand!). In his words:
"...there's no way to get the (not provided) terms, so they'll be counted as unbranded for now (but in the Moz web app, you wouldn't see them anyway).
In the future, I think it would be cool to try showing (not provided) as its own specific category so it can be compared against other groups you create."
This will go on our feature list for future updates. Thanks for asking!
God work guys. I used to track these metrics in custom segments in Google analytics but this saves me some of the leg work. The ability to capture misspelling is very important... one of my clients has their brand name misspelled 40% of the time!
Thanks for the new features.
Nice
Thanks for the feature. Will save me a lot of time!
Very nais! I like :)
Nice feature. Tracking branded search and direct traffic shows me how well my traditional marketing is working. Thanks!
Nice software, everyone should use this. Thanks to SEOMOZ for creating this for seo purpose.
Regards,
Rooliums
https://www.rooliums.com
very informative post.. clean and simple let me try to get this one for my use.. i hope to have good experience on it.. anybody els who have an experience on this?
thanx
This is awesome, Karen. Thanks for explaining it so well! I'm looking forward to getting results back in the next weeks and tracking better!
This is awesome. One question: How does it handle the (not set) keyword visits from Google SSL-enabled searches? Does it just not count them at all for these metrics?
I just set this up in our account, nice to have another place to see it besides my Excel sheets :)
Thanks!
Unfortunately Brian, there's no way to get the (not provided) terms, so they'll all be counted as unbranded for now (but in the Moz web app, you wouldn't see them anyway).
In the future, I think it would be cool to try showing (not provided) as its own specific category so it can be compared against the other groups you create.
Gotcha, thanks!
Right now we internally count it as a third, separate category from branded and nonbranded, so that we look at "branded" "nonbranded" and "SSL". We went a level deeper then and then looked at the entrance page for SSL visits and found that it matches almost exactly the behavior of our other search visitors in terms of what pages and how much - Confirming our suspicion that SSL searchers and visitors behave about the same as non-SSL searchers. We keep counting it as a separate category that we can easily observe this way though.
Good and simple post! These last months i used to analyze trafic from search engines (specially google) and i have noticed that when i get good rankings on any given "generic term" my "brand" visits increase automatically!....but the reverse is not true! Why?
Then i found this answer: According to me brand trafic is definetely a sign of authority, and people should treat this trafic with the same ambition that obtain good rankings on generic kws; however you can't optimize your brand trafic with the hope that you will get better positions on generic searches!
This is great! Thanks! I've been doing this type of analysis through some segementation in our analytics software, but having this in one place is a fantastic time saver!
Now this is REALLY cool! I just set it up and I think I need to explore it a bit more.
Thank you so much!!
First of all - Hi Karen! Always nice to learn to know new Moz members.
Second - amazing that you added that brand feature!
Hi Petra! Great to be here with y'all. Glad you all like the feature, and hope you find it useful!
How is the feeling when you are actually get your head in the data and the moment you click on the campaign button the app crash..GRR.. the same thing happen to me last night and when i hit twitter to tell @SEOmoz about it i saw @jennita talking about the awesomeness coming our way through SEOmoz pro and i was like OK!...
Guess what... “Branded keyword tool” this is BIG.. simply loved it and happy to be the part of such an amazing community!
An early Christmas pressent and even better than that it's not a pair of socks! Fantastic new feature that will really help make things a lot clearer! Looking forward to giving this a go!
Completely agree, brand traffic is a massively important KPI to most businesses and I always segment out organic traffic into brand vs non-brand traffic. I think it depends on the sites you're working on though, some ecommerce sites seem to happily plod along without getting much brand orientated traffic - I am however convinced the bsst sites are those that get branded traffic - and I'm sure since the Vince update these are positively contribute towards the way the site ranks.
Just anaother awesome feature, MOZ guys! I love the new Reports feature as well.
What about targetting branded keywords in respect to capture the traffic of those visitors who are looking for branded products over web specially through B2B buying.
What if i am selling "replica nike shoes" from china and targetting nike shoes suppliers, would it work? would it comes in discrimination or violence of branded products?
Brilliant! Less time fumbling around Google Analytics, more time chillin' on SEOmoz :P