Search engines belong to the large category of traffic referrers that bring organic (free) and paid (advertising campaigns) traffic to websites. People use search engines to seek all kinds of information, that’s why traffic from search engines is tremendously important to online marketing and the Internet in general. The list of search engines is numerous but only some of them are used worldwide. These are Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live. Usually the companies spend large amounts of money trying to improve a site’s ranking on these search engines. The desire to have optimized position in search engines has evolved into pay-per-click and pay-for-placement options from the major engines.

Because of the advent of pay-per-click and pay-for-placement options (sponsored links) from the major search engines, the traffic brought by them is now subcategorized. When you examine the traffic from a given search engine it is important to distinguish sources in the mix of traffic. Generally, there are three ways to acquire traffic volume from search engines: 1) optimize your Web pages for organic placement; 2) use some type of paid placement, either pay-per-click or pay-for-placement; 3) use both options.

You should definitely identify any paid search engine placements to help you single out paid placement from organic ones. This will allow to determine of how well you are indexed in the search engines and how well the paid traffic is paying off. Knowing this helps to understand how much traffic you can likely expect from this piece of your marketing program.

Organic traffic depends greatly on search engine rankings. The lower your rankings the lower traffic volumes you’ll get. It has been shown that the overwhelming majority of Internet users never go deeper than the third search engine result page. If a lot of customers come to you from result pages it is obvious that you should monitor your site rankings and the quantity of your Web pages indexed by search engines.

Advertising campaigns are a powerful means of directing highly targeted traffic to your website. Unlike Search Engine Optimization which targets all Web surfers on all search engines and allows you to only marginally regulate the keywords by which you are found, advertising means consciously selecting only relevant resources and keywords. In this case you are running a PPC campaign with the help of a particular search engine.

Thus, the visitors you receive as a result of advertising are more likely to convert into buyers on your site.

However, not every advertising campaign proves to be cost-effective. Let’s assume your site sells office furniture. So you sign up for a PPC account at Google Adwords and pay around $0.50 per click on your ad for “executive office desk” and “office computer desk“. As a result, when people search using any of these keywords on Google, they are shown your ad with a link to your site.

Both keywords generate certain amount of traffic to your site when Google surfers click on your ads. So your average expense on these campaigns is about $200 each.

In fact the searchers of “executive office desks” are not satisfied with what you have to offer unlike the searchers of “office computer desks“. Actually none of those visitors that find your site on Google when your ad is shown for “executive office desks” make a purchase. In the meantime, visitors that primarily searched for “office computer desks” buy several desks, totally covering your expense on that campaign.

The main problem is that you don’t know which keywords work well for you.

HitLens helps to resolve this problem by offering a special mechanism for advertising campaign tracking. Once a visitor entered your site, HitLens is able to detect every visitor’s action within limits, even if a visitor leaves your site and returns several days later to make a purchase. If HitLens knows what campaign and what exact keywords directed the visitor to your Web page, it is able to assign the visitor to the campaign and also assign the corresponding revenue to that campaign when the visitor completes a transaction.

Thus, HitLens is an indispensable tool for measuring the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and leveraging expenses in order to get the most out of your publicity. Use it to calculate the ROI for every ad campaign and where applicable, for every keyword you target to switch off underperforming programs.

Mechanism of tracking campaigns

Theoretically, any time you give somebody a link to your website, it can be treated as an advertising campaign, even if you don’t pay for it. Mostly, you give your links to the owners of other sites and to PPC search engines. However, you may also budget for and advertise through other media as well, such as newspapers, newsletters, and television. When you provide a link to your site in them, these are advertising campaigns that can be tracked through HitLens.

The key to tracking these kinds of campaigns is in the URL address provided for visitors interested in surfing your landing page.

For HitLens to be able to track a particular visitor coming from a particular campaign - for example, “tell-friends” or “weekly-newsletter” - this URL must be built according to the following pattern:

http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm?source=tell-friends

You see that here the address of the web page to which you want to redirect the visitors (http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm) is supplemented by the special parameter “source” which goes after the “?” sign and has the value “tell-friends”.

When HitLens processes the visit, it extracts the “source” parameter from the URL requested by the visitor and treats it as the name of the campaign. So, if you ask your friend to place a banner pointing to your home page on his or her site, and want to track this campaign, you might want to link this banner to “http://www.yourhomepage.com?source=friend+banner”. Thus, HitLens will know that the visitors who click on that banner come from the “friend banner” campaign.

(Note: the part of the URL which follows the optional question mark “?” is called the “query string”. If you ever need a space in the query string, replace it with a plus “+”).

When you open HitLens, you will be able to access all reports related to your campaigns under the “Campaigns” report group. You will also be able to configure the budget for your campaigns so that HitLens knows how much of your expense is already covered and is able to calculate the ROI (return on investment).

Remember that campaign tracking will only begin when the first visitor is referred through the campaign. Before that, the campaign remains invisible to HitLens even if it has started and the campaign link is placed on another site. Until the first visitor comes to your landing page by following the campaign link, you will not be able to set the budget and further configure this campaign.

Also, your landing page must have the valid HitLens tracking code otherwise no clicks will be counted.

Special cases

Sometimes you need to track not only campaigns themselves, but also keywords, as one campaign can deal with several keywords. For instance, we own the website “www.weatherscreen.com” and bid on Google AdWords for “weather forecast software”, “long-range weather forecast”, and “desktop weather forecast”. We will organize them into one single campaign “AdWords” yet reserve the possibility to differentiate between the performances of different keywords:

http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm?source=overture&kwd=weather+forecast+software

http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm?source=overture&kwd=long-range+weather+forecast

http://www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.htm?source=overture&kwd=desktop+weather+forecast

Thus, a link “details” will appear next to our “overture” campaign in the HitLens report where we will be able to analyze keyword performance.

The main reason it is important to understand search engine traffic is to make sure that any money spent on search engine optimization and paid inclusion is repayable. Though a search engine report won’t tell you what visitors are doing when they land on your website it will help you understand the total volume of traffic you get from each search engine. That is why traffic volume monitoring is very important, keeping in mind that conversion is a small fragment from the amount of potential visitors to be converted.

Search engines are very important sources of traffic and similar to referring sites, monitoring traffic volumes from search engines is important to ensure that you are getting visitors from them. Make sure you understand why there occurs any sudden change in traffic volumes. To optimize your site’s placement in a search engine you spend time, money or energy and you hope and expect to see an increase in the volume of traffic coming from this source. When you observe a decrease in the traffic volume (no matter how sudden or gradual) from any engine that previously brought you traffic, it is worthwhile to study the reason and the potential effect this will have on your online business.

HitLens can help measure organic and paid traffic. All the needed information on free visitors can be found in the Referrers category in the following reports: Search Engines, Top 100 Keywords by Search Engines. Reports on paid traffic are singled out in the Campaigns category. Reports that are of primary importance to you are: Activity by Campaigns and Cost of Visit by Campaign.