Counting unique landing pages in Google Analytics: social vs organic channels
-
Remember the technique Rand posted for counting the unique indexed landing pages on a site?
http://moz.com/blog/indexation-for-seo-real-numbers-in-5-easy-steps
I'm using Google Analytics to compare this result for the "social" channel vs. the "organic search" channel. The idea is to see whether social or search delivers people to more unique landing pages.
I would expect organic search to yield a significantly higher count, due to long tail searches for relatively obscure terms. We have an archive of over 500k pages that Google could be indexing, even if only a fraction of a percent of those might be getting social mentions. But that's not what the numbers show -- I'm seeing roughly 10% higher numbers for the Social channel than for Organic Search. Again, I'm counting unique landing pages here, not the total pageviews or visits.
If anyone else here is monitoring these metrics, please chime in with your results. What's the baseline expectation for a large website with hundreds of thousands of pages of issue-centric user-generated content? Should search traffic provide 2x more landing page exposures than social? 5x? 10x? or 0.9x, as in my case?
In short, I believe these numbers are pointing to an indexing/ranking problem following a recent site redesign.
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
-
Does a link in facebook count as a backlink?
Q: Does a link in a facebook post count as a backlink? Q: is it a 'do follow' or 'no follow' link? Q: twitter uses short links, so when someone links to me, do i get the points/juice from the backlink?
Social Media | | kevinbp3 -
What do you do when your Facebook page is Unpublished?
The page in question has been there for about 5 years and has about 80 followers. It is for a business that sells steel plate (B2B) and everything is totally compliant with Facebook T&C as far as I can tell. It's been unpublished with the statement "Your Page has been unpublished and it cannot be published again." We did an appeal about 6 weeks ago and heard absolutely nothing.... Generally we got no likes, no comments and reached about 20 people with each post. So I am lost as to why we were banned and lost as to what we do next It's fine if they want to unpublish - it's their site - what's frustrating is the arbitrariness, the lack of information as to why it was banned and lack of communication. It's fine if it's a spam site (except if you are a spammer) but I'm selling boring steel plates..... pwqkaz1xzkx7myx2ncwn
Social Media | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Analytics tagging on social media links
Curious: do you all tag your social media links with Google Analytics parameters? I know Google Analytics automatically tags referrals from social channels, but I am interested in possibly adding additional tracking parameters to links that I share and potentially promote. If I tag my social links with GA tracking codes, and they are shared widely, do I lose any potential SEO value from those links? I know Google isn't necessarily factoring in social shares from Facebook, etc. yet, but it would seem that, since tagged links are ones that we've influenced, any shares of that link would potentially be considered unnatural? Just curious what others' best practices are for social sharing. Thanks, in advance.
Social Media | | kylie_rw1 -
Yotpo for eCommerce social reviews
Anyone have experiences using Yotpo to support reviews for an eCommerce site? Best,
Social Media | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
Share This Count Vs Google Analytics - Why the difference?
We use the Share This facebook & twitter widgets on blog posts. Share this auto tags it in Google Analytics so we can see share count with in the analytics interface. Viewing the blog post I see the share counts as a lot higher than google analytics reports. Does anyone know why the count would be different?
Social Media | | Jeff_Lucas0 -
Facebook pages invites via email
Hi Within Facebook business admin there is an option to email your contacts to invite them to like your page. Has anyone done this? and would sending this invite request out to your mailing list of subscribers be allowed in Facebook or would it be seen as spamming? even though they have opted in to recieve communications/news/offers from the company?
Social Media | | ocelot0 -
Outsourcing social media optimization
Is it a good idea to outsource social media optimization or is it something that has to be done in-house? I understand the question is kind of vague, but what I had in mind was to have an offshore contractor post daily about individual products and try to increase our following on twitter/facebook (i.e "social footprint").
Social Media | | inhouseseo0 -
Does social media really work?
I just finished a 2 week test using Twitter. The person running the test was tweeting for 1 hour every day, but the tweets were broken up into several different times throughout the day. She engaged in conversations, retweeted, posted interested and catchy topics and linked to our blog. By the end of the test, we only saw a 7% increase in traffic to the blog. There was no noticeable increase in sales. According to an article I read by Business Insider, Applied Predictive Technologies ran a test to help companies like Starbucks measure the impact of social media. They concluded that social media accounted for a 2% increase in sales. That's not much for the time and money that goes into it. What's your experience with social media? When I first posted this, I neglected to say this Twitter account is one we have been activly using for about 2 years, and we have posted to it at least once or twice every day for the last couple of years. And, we are a well established company for the past 8 years, and we regularily submit press releases and have written 2 articles per day on our blog for several years.
Social Media | | BradBorst0