Web Analytics India

- Contributed by Anish Jacob

“Can you confirm that there is no overlap between the organic search traffic and the paidsearch traffic reported in Google Analytics?”
This was the question posed to me by a client recently…

I immediately turned to the Advanced Segmentation feature of the tool. I quickly set up three custom segments as follows:

1. Organic Search Traffic: The segment of visitors that originated from organic search sources
2. Paid Search Traffic: The segment of visitors that originated from paid search sources
3. All Search Traffic: The segment of visitors from all search sources i.e, paid and organic

My hypothesis was that if there is no overlap of traffic then the sum of visits form organic sources and paid sources should be equal to the visits reported by all sources. However if the numbers don’t add up then we need to investigate and see what is causing the overlap.

I applied the segmentation to the Visitors Overview and the numbers spoke for themselves… no overlap! Thanks to the Advanced Segmentation feature answers such questions from clients is quick and easy.