Before moving full time into web analytics I had been in charge of running the PPC campaigns for our clients.  In many cases the PPC campaigns would drive well over 25% of the entire sites traffic.  During that time I had also been in charge of tracking the success of several banner ad campaigns.  Working in these other areas previously has allowed me to now better understand the effect that various marketing campaigns can have on the sites overall performance metrics.

Below are three potential campaigns that could affect your overall site metrics.

• A PPC campaign which had been driving ample of traffic to the site but wasn’t resulting in many conversions gets turned off.  As a result the overall traffic drops by 10%.
• Your company launches a new social media campaign that really takes off virally.  As a result you suddenly see a huge spike in referrals from sites that you’d never seen traffic from before.  You also see a significant increase in organic traffic on your brand terms.
• A banner ad campaign is run announcing a new product release.  You notice a 5% increase in visits, but also a 15% spike in the overall bounce rate.

While these generally wouldn’t be run as stand alone campaigns, they do illustrate what can happen to your overall site metrics when various marketing initiatives are undertaken.  That’s why it’s very important as an individual responsible for your sites analytics to also be up to speed on all the marketing initiatives that are taking place.  Not only do you need to be kept abreast of what is currently being run, but those responsible for the campaigns should be working in conjunction with you before the campaigns are even launched.  That way you’ll have been able to setup your analytics to segment out the campaign traffic and allow those individuals that are responsible for the campaigns to see exactly how they perform.  You’ll also be able to quickly explain abnormalities within the overall site stats as a result of these campaigns without having to spend an inordinate amount of time digging through the data looking for the culprit.

Filed under: Analytics on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 by Nate Linnell |
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