How to Identify Audience Overlap
-
Hi, what is the best way to identify audience overlap? I ask because I manage a collection of sites that I believe serves the same audience and feel that we may be cannibalizing our marketing efforts.
Site A - Is our supplement/vitamin store and receives around 38% of our total traffic. Ultimately, we want people to funnel to this site as it is where they would be converting obviously.
Site B - Is our expert/spokespersons site and receives about 40% of our traffic.
Site C - Is a specific weight loss brand created and endorsed by our spokesperson and sold on Site A. This site gets around 16% of our traffic.
Site D - Is also a specific weight loss program also endorsed by our spokesperson and sold on Site A. It gets the remaining 6% or so of traffic.
Now, all of these sites have a fairly similar focus and I can probably come up with several arguments to either keep or do away with them. I'd like to be able to look at analytics data though, that could help in making that decision. Ultimately, sites a and b would be kept regardless but I have always wondered if we would be better served by consolidating sites c and d into a.
-
This is very helpful I appreciate it.
-
Kane, this is a very informative, generous and valuable post. Nice work!
-
I've got a couple ideas here.
1 - Set up Cross Domain GA Tracking
This would measure literal overlap in users over time. Basically - has this person been on any of our sites before?
I'd probably do this with a new GA UA account to keep the current accounts the way they are.
If you're not doing affiliate tracking between the sites then this added analytics layer may be a good idea anyways.
2 - Set up Leadfeeder.com accounts
This can show you some information based upon user IP address. Not much different than GA data but fun to look at.
3 - Analyze email lists
Assuming you've got lists built for each of these sites, compare them in rapleaf or full contact and do a subjective/manual review of the customers that you can pull data on.
4 - Set up retargeting scripts on all of the sites, and then run some retargeting campaigns
You should be able to get some general insights from Facebook, Twitter, etc on basic audience demographics. Basically building a custom audience and then pulling them into Facebook audience insights once you have enough people in that audience group for each site.
5 - Check social insights
If you have any social followers that are separate you should be able to compare page owner insights on these audiences.
6 - Keyword Overlap
Use the domain comparison tool in SEMRush and see how much ranking overlap there is. May or may not be relevant to the audience, but I can make an easy argument for a site merger if there's cannibalization there and neither site is ranking 1st for many of those keywords.
7 - Look at conversion data
If you're getting a strong conversion rate from referral traffic from sites B, C, and D, that should bolster your argument. By strong I mean above your site's average conversion rate.
General takeaways:
From what you've said so far, I think you can make an easy argument to merge sites C and D into the main site.
Site B is the harder decision, especially since I'm not sure how many constraints you have in regards to claims made on site B and the laws surrounding supplements and vitamins. Microsites can go either way IMO - I've seen great ones and I've seen some that never should have been separated. There's an easy SEO argument for merging them but it may not be the best brand decision.
A good relevant example is the bulletproofexec.com site and their upgradedself.com ecommerce store. Pure SEO standpoint would be to merge these 2 sites, but I think they've got a strong brand built up in one and they may not want to sell those products on their main lifestyle/blog site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Identify Page Not Found Visits
Hello everyone! I have always known enough about Google Analytics and SEO to be dangerous, but was not a focus for me. I am working on a project were I am looking at stuff where my knowledge is limited. The scenario is that the domain I am looking at will serve a 404 error, but keeps the url, I guess for tracking purposes. At the same time, there is a page "Page_Not_Found" that has elevated visits. I am not sure how to tell where the visits are coming from to the PNF since the Previous Page is mostly identified as "(entrance)" Is the PNF correlated to the process of serving an error page but not changing the URL? Ideally, I am looking to identify and improve the 404 visits. I hope that I provided clear enough information. Happy to provide more as needed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HankHoffmeier0 -
Tool to identify if meta description are showing?
Hi we have a Ecommerce client with 1000s of meta descriptions, we have noticed that some meta descriptions are not showing properly, we want to pull and see which ones are showing on Google SERP results. You can use tools like screaming frog to pull meta description from page, but we want to see if it's showing for certain keywords. Any ideas on how to automate this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianna00 -
Steady decline since Panda 4.0 but struggling to identify cause (and solution!).
Hello I work as an in-house SEO (previously worked for an agency) for the website naturalworldsafaris.com. After a strong start to the year we were seeing really good growth but since Panda 4.0 was released we have been steadily declining. Our site has, I believe, good, unique content and is largely free of technical issues. I'm struggling to identify what exactly is the issue for the drop. We've had several key terms drop from the top half of page 1 to page 2 of the SERPS, such as the term "Borneo Holiday" (on a Google UK search). I don't believe we have any duplicate content issues. We've had a few external SEO specialists take a look and none have come up with anything new. Site speed has been flagged as a concern but when compared to our competitors in the SERPS we are consistently one of the faster sites so while we are looking to improve this, I don't feel it can be the only issue. Any suggestions as to what else we should be investigating next would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite0 -
Just identified and reversed a severe footer links penalty - any similar experiences out there?
Just seen my first rather dramatic sitewide footer links penalty. Virtually all organic search traffic fell off site for 3 months. The footer links were a mix of keyphrases targeted at internal pages and keyphrases targeted at a handful of other associated companies (a group of enterprises owned by same businessman, with websites hosted in the same place). The website developers felt they were improving search engine visibility. Anyway, as soon as I started work with this client I requested immediate removal of the footer links and traffic immediately recovered to pre-penalty levels (within a couple of days). Have any of you experienced anything similar?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Have you guys seen this yet: panguintool.com to help identify what hit the ranks
Have you guys seen this yet: panguintool.com Works with GA to show traffic superimposed with Panda/Penguin/other
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw
updates to help discover what hit the ranks. Looks interesting, requests access to your GA account.0 -
Ecombuffet.com are offering a Rescue Review focused on Panda - Penguin and identifying issues. Has anyone used this service or aware of the organisation in general?
http://www.ecombuffet.com/rescue-review.htm . I have 2 sites that have definitely been hit by penguin and getting worse so am thinking of paying for this service as nothing I do seems to stop the slide (more like a plummet). Any comments welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shaann1 -
Whats the best search parameters on Open Site Explorer for identifying un-natural back links?
Using open site explorer, what parameters will best narrow down low quality back links(or back links that could be viewed as un-natural by Google)? ie. blog networks, link schemes, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stromme0 -
Need help identifying why my content rich site was hurt by the Panda Update.
Hi - I run a hobby related niche new / article / resource site (http://tinyurl.com/4eavaj4) which has been heavily impacted by the Panda update. Honestly I have no idea why my Google rankings dropped off. I've hired 2 different SEO experts to look into it and no one has been able to figure it out. My link profile is totally white hat and stronger then the majority of my competitors, I have 4000+ or so pages of unique, high quality content, am a Google News source, and publish about 5 new unique articles every day. I ended up deleting a 100 or so thin video pages on my site, did some url reorganization (using 301s), and fixed all the broken links. That appeared to be helping as my traffic was returning to normal. Then the bottom dropped out again. Since Saturday my daily traffic has dropped by 50%. I am really baffled at this point as to what to do so any help would be sincerely appreciated. Thanks, Mike jamescrayton2003@yahoo.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeATL0