Back To Basics: Part 3 - The Power of Exclusion

In Part 2, we saw that a store owner gained an unexpected lift in search traffic to his website after running a promotion on a referring site. The questions we left until this week to answer are these: How many extra searches resulted from the promotion? And, what keywords did people search on?

To answer these questions, we need to compare what usually happens versus what actually happened after the promotion. A good way to do this is to use the Compare to Past feature on the date range selector. If we compare the previous week with the promotion week, we can see how much of a lift there was after the promotion.










Notice that we use the exact same days, Monday through Sunday, so that the days of the week line up. Here is the resulting graph. The green line is the search traffic leading up to the promotion (what he would ordinarily expect without a promotion); the blue line is the search traffic during and after the promotion.








From the report below, you can see the specific increase for each keyword.

























The promotion resulted in a 209.68% increase in searches on the first keyword and an increase of 1,242.86% in searches on the second keyword. That’s good to know. It looks like one day promotions are the way to go for this business.

This is good example of how to use Compare to Past. You might also want to check out this tip on how to line up your date ranges when using Compare to Past.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team