How Search Engine Reports Are Calculated

       Number of visitors shows how many visitors came from a particular search term on a particular search engine.

       Visitors as percentages shows the number of visitors for each search term, as a percentage of the total number of visitors from that search engine.

       Total cost shows the total cost of your pay-per-click campaigns for a particular search term on a particular search engine.

Cost per visitor shows you the average cost per visitor of your pay-per-click campaigns for that search term and search engine. This shows you who are the most expensive visitors to bring in. If you are using ClickTracks Pro, you can compare this with the revenue from the same visitors to see if they are also your most valuable visitors.

Proportion of short visits shows the percentage of visitors who spent less than five seconds on your site. This generally indicates that they reached the landing page but then left immediately. If this number is high, it indicates that something is wrong with your ad or with the landing page. Does the landing page deliver what the ad promised? Is it easy to navigate to the rest of site from there? If these are pay-per-click visitors, you are paying for them, but they are not getting past the first page. Deliver what they are looking for, or else change your ad text or keywords to promise only what you can deliver.

Reports that include cost of visitors ( ) are only available after configuring campaigns.

Only searches are shown

The main table of the Search Engine report shows only those visitors that performed a search. It does not include other clicks from, for example, the directory section of Google. It also shows the actual search term as typed by the user and not the PPC term purchased.

It's The Referring Search Engine, Not The PPC Source

Columns show the search engine the user typed the search into. Thus Google PPC clicks can appear in the AOL column. If you want number of clicks according to the PPC source (campaign in ClickTracks) use the Campaign Report

Totals

Each search engine column contains a total. This total is for all the searches from the engine, and probably includes rows that are not displayed in the report. If you really want to manually add the rows to confirm ClickTracks is capable of basic arithmetic, click 'more rows' to expand the number. You may need to make it very large.

Definition of visitors

A visitor count ( ) is the number of visitors not the unique visitors. Unique visitors is not useful in search analysis because it would not count the same visitor coming to the site, leaving, searching again and coming back within a short time. This happens in the real world, so visitors is the correct fundamental unit that should be counted.

Definition of cost

A report that shows cost ( ) counts the cost from the corresponding campaign in the Campaign Manager. The cost of a visitor is extracted from this data based on the landing page + tracking parameters and is then mapped against the original search term automatically.