Friday, May 1, 2009

Nikki on the WA group has an interesting question - She wants to know the difference between 'organic clicks' and 'organic referring clicks'

I am first of all against using these kind of metrics at a site level without clearly understanding what they imply.

Since Nikki uses HBX (my favorite WA tool), here is my best approach towards solving her issue:
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In a visit, the referrer tag is populated by the WA tools based on the referrer= information supplied by the browser.

E.g:
If you go to www.google.com and search for "buying cheap cameras" and it throws up an
ebay link that you click, the browser will add the tag
referrer = google when you visit ebay

Similarly for other sites that lead you to ebay.

All of these are referral traffic - It is organic if it is natural (not paid for - e.g: Natural search traffic), it is inorganic if it is paid for (e.g: Paid Search traffic)

Now it may so happen that in the same visit, you come to ebay from google, from yahoo, from microsoft search as well as from other sites, who would you give the credit?

The credit should go to the first person that got you to ebay.

This is populated in the referrer dimension in VS/HBX
Use that as a dimension and get the visits/clicks by the referrer. Do not use it on the metrics side - and sum up the values of visits/clicks to get it for the site.
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