Every now and then, one of our catalog clients looks at their Google Analytics, sees that the majority of their online business comes from “Organic Search,” and decides to slash their catalog mailings. Not so fast!
Look more closely, and the vast majority of organic searches are almost always branded ones. That is, they involve some variation of the company name. Sometimes it’s the company name itself. Other times, it’s the company URL, some other variation or misspelling of the company name, or perhaps a proprietary product.
It’s likely that more than 75% of your organic searches are for branded searches. This traffic, plus your “Direct” traffic (i.e., people who typed your URL directly into the navigation bar), is coming from people who are already familiar with your company. Chances are that nearly all of the Direct and branded Organic Search traffic is catalog-driven. Cut your catalog mailings, and you’ll cut your Organic Search in the process.
There are a couple caveats regarding how to calculate what percentage of your traffic comes from branded search. I’ll go into those in my next post.
