Measuring organic traffic sent to a given page

What do you do if you want to know a precise number of visitors referred to a given page by organic search? Fortunately, there is a way to get to that number in Google Analytics. But again, it’s not very easy to get there. I will show you the way.

Report on number of visitors referred to a given page by organic search

You don’t know if your work on SEO is really effective until you report on the traffic driven by organic search. Recording the number of visitors referred once a month is a great way to see whether or not your efforts are paying off.

For bonus points, if you have a Goal set up, you can also find out the conversion rate for visitors referred by organic search.

For this example, we will report on the number of visitors referred to the home page of CFWheels from organic search. Hey, because it’s an open source project, I won’t make anyone angry by sharing these details.

How to set it up in Google Analytics

This time, we’ll get a precise number of visitors by using a Traffic Sources report in Google Analytics. Start by clicking the Traffic Sources link in the left navigation.

Next, click on the Search Engines link that appears in the left navigation.

Now that we’re on the Search Engines report, find the non-paid link just below the giant line graph. Click it.

This will show you stats for how much organic traffic was sent from each search engine.

To show how many people landed on each page, find the drop-down marked as Dimension and set it to Landing Page.

Now you will finally see a list of URLs that visitors have landed on and how many visits there have been for your chosen date range.

If the page that you’re interested in doesn’t appear in the list that appears, try searching for it in the Filter Landing Page Containing search box at the bottom of the page.

Note that if you’re reporting on the index page of a section (index.html, index.php, home.aspx, etc.), you will need to find the backslash / record.

In our example, we can see that 463 visitors have been referred to the home page by organic search over the past month.

If you have Goals set up in Analytics (highly recommended!), we can also report on how effective that landing page is when people land there from organic search. Google Analytics can tell you how each landing page works with up to 4 different goals.

Taking a look at the Goal Conversion tab, we can see in the example that visitors who land on the home page from organic search download the freeware file 8.24% of the time.

This is a very powerful report because now I can set a goal to increase that conversion rate next month. Imagine that: actually using web analytics to drive better business results!

One of the caveats still applies

I’ll repeat the first caveat from the last post. It still applies to this scenario as well.

Caveat #1: Inconsistent links on your site

Unfortunately, if you have multiple links on your site that point to the same content, you could have a problem with getting to the metrics that you want.

For example, if you have links on your site to each of these

• /products
• /Products
• /products/index.html
• /products/

then those URLs are going to show up separately in Google Analytics. This applies to mixed case variants.

The best way to avoid this problem is to go through your site and use a consistent linking convention. I prefer all lowercase with a trailing slash, as in <a href="/products/">Products</a>. If this is too painstaking, you may just want to see which version of the URL that Google search results are sending users to, for starters.

I hope you find these reports useful and another way to drill down to measure the performance of your search marketing efforts.