Cool custom report: Segmenting by brandedness of search terms

by rocky

Our “How are first-time visits different” post last month was apparently a big success. It produced some inquiries about branded search terms vs non-branded. Our post said this:

Pattern uncovered: First-timers are brought to the site by generic search terms. Veterans almost always arrive by brand-specific search terms, if they use search engines at all. Lesson: make sure paid search terms that are generic go to landing pages that sell the visitor on your company as a whole and provide other first-time-critical info. Monitor conversion and retention rates for the revised landing pages, concentrating on effects on first-timers.

This is just one of the many insights you can find if you separate brand and non-brand (generic) search terms. It’s a must-do if you are investing in PPC or SEO.

Warning – once you start down this path, you could get addicted. You’ll want to subdivide search terms more finely than just brand versus no-brand. It all has a very high probability of being worthwhile as well as interesting. Let me know what you find, eh?

So the question is, how can you get reports on what happens in visits coming from branded versus non-branded terms?

Easy. You make custom reports that include only brand-name search terms or only non-brand search terms. The reports can have anything you like as a dimension — what URLs were looked at, what Content Groups, New vs Returning visits. You can even set a Scenario Analysis as a dimension to compare funnel throughput.

The reports we describe here use the search term as found in the referrer field. They’ll include both organic and PPC search visits.

The prep work involves two custom filters:

The first custom filter allows/excludes visits that are from brand-term search phrases:

Type of filter: Visit
Filter must match – one or more criteria (important to select this one! otherwise you get empty reports)
Add New Match Criteria
Filter on: Search Phrase
Equal to [brand term; can be a partial match]
Match on: Regular Expression (my preference is Regular Expression. You can use Text match with * if you want)

(Keep adding search phrases that contain brand term snippets. The list can get as long as you want.)

The other custom filter allows/excludes visits that are from search:

Type of filter: Visit
Filter must match — doesn’t matter which one you pick
Add New Match Criteria
Filter on: Search Phrase
Equal to *
Match on: Text

And, the custom reports are:

Report that includes only brand-term search phrases:

Dimension: Whatever you want, like URL or Content Groups
Filter: The brand-term search phrase filter (first filter), as an INCLUDE

Report that includes only NON-brand-term search phrases:

Dimension: Whatever you want, like URL or Content Groups
Filter 1: The “search traffic” filter (other filter), as an INCLUDE
Filter 2: The brand-term search phrase filter (first filter), as an EXCLUDE

Do you see how the second one works? It gets all the non-brand-term traffic by excluding the brand-term traffic … but you have to have the “include search traffic” filter to avoid pulling in a zillion non-search visits that would result in a huge “None” row.

Extra-credit tip: Your brand-term filter probably isn’t completely complete, no matter how smart you are. It’s a good idea to create one other report that you should eyeball from time to time for strings you missed. This is the report. I call this type of report a “checkup report”: