Five insights your paid search team should be stealing from organic

Getting clicks is great, but it’s way more important to know what happens after you get those clicks. That’s why I was so excited last month when my employer, Google, announced a deeper integration between Search Console and Google Analytics (GA).

With these wonderful new reports, you can see how visitors reached your site, along with what they did once they got there.

It’s a big win for inbound marketers of all shapes and sizes. But I, alas, am not an inbound marketer. Paid search is my bread and butter. Not wanting to miss out on the data-joining goodness of this new set of reports, I want to go through the cool new things you can do with Search Console reports in GA, and how you can steal organic search insights and apply them to your paid search campaigns.

1. Find out what organic’s doing to drive lots and lots of traffic (even if it’s unengaged traffic)

From an organic perspective, you can isolate landing pages that generate lots of impressions and a high click-through rate, but that also have crummy GA engagement metrics. In this case, the organic takeaway is straightforward — make your site more engaging for those queries.

How paid search can steal some insight: You definitely don’t want to replicate the problem you’re seeing on the organic side of high CTR/low engagement. Here’s a “no duh” statement: Aim for high CTR/high engagement.

The copy that drives high CTRs from any of your organic listings is just begging to be incorporated into your ad text. There’s never been a better time to re-evaluate the messaging of your ad text. Write better ads that direct to a more successful page of your site while your organic team is busy making those other pages more engaging. Then, once they’re done, you have a new set of landing pages to try out yourself.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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About The Author

Matt Lawson

Matt Lawson is the Director of Performance Ads Marketing for Google, responsible for a broad portfolio of ads products including search, shopping, display, and analytics.