If I asked you what’s been happening to your organic traffic over the past year or so, would you know the answer?
Not just how much traffic you’re getting right now, but how this has changed over time, in terms of quality and quantity?
If you don’t know how to find this information, our Google Demystified in two minutes video will show you every step – and all you need is your trusty Google Analytics account. And 120 seconds to try it yourself.
Watch the timer – it’s two minutes exactly!
Transcript below for those who prefer text, such as Google…
How to identify the trend in the number of organic visitors to your website
The first thing we need to do is to make sure we’re only looking at the organic visitors. The easiest way to do this is to click on add segment, go to system on the left, then scroll down until you see organic traffic. Select that. Then let’s drag the all users segment out of the way, so that we’re only seeing the graph for the number of organic visitors that come to the website each day.
From there we need to open up the date range a little. So I’m going to click on the date, and the from date right now is set as 2018. So I’m going to change that to 2017, so that we’re looking at a longer period of data here.
Then to make it a little easier to see the trend, instead of looking at the day view, I’m going to change that to week. So we’re now seeing the number of visitors that come to the website each week from organic sources, over the last 13 months. Bear in mind that you might have to ignore the first and the last data points, as these may be partial weeks. So that’s the quantity dealt with.
How to also look at the quality of these visitors
This is very easy.
Click to the right of the users drop-down, then on the select a metric option.
In terms of quality indicators, these are some of the simplest at the top: either the bounce rate or session duration.
I’m going to choose session duration here.
So in the graph, the dark blue line shows the number of visitors that came from organic search each week, and the light blue line shows the amount of time they spent. What we can see here is that around about the beginning of December the number of visitors started to fall quite dramatically from about 8,900, going as low as 3,700. That’s quite a drop!
But look at what happened to the actual time that they’re spending on the website. It seemed to rise from about two minutes 21 seconds to almost three minutes. So although the quantity of organic visitors has gone down, the quality has gone up. For the most part, I think that’s a pretty healthy thing to be looking at.
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