For any organic search campaign, you would be interested in knowing three aspects of the campaign:

1. How the campaign has performed
2. How organic visitors have consumed your contents
3. How the organic campaign has helped other marketing campaigns (PPC, email, social, affiliate, etc.) in completing conversions

I am going to outline the process I follow to determine the true value of SEO campaigns:

Step-1: Create a custom report in Universal Analytics that includes only organic search data and contains the following dimensions and metrics:

Dimensions: Source/Medium

Metrics: Sessions, Goal Completions, Goal Value, Revenue, Goal Conversion Rate, Ecommerce Conversion Rate, Pageviews, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate, and Pages/session.

However, this custom report does not provide complete insight as the conversions (goal conversions & ecommerce transactions) reported are all last non-direct click conversions, i.e. these are the conversions that occurred when organic search was the last non-direct marketing channel a person was exposed to before he/she converted.

• So the goal completions you see in this custom report are the last non-direct click goal completions.  
• The goal conversion rate you see in this report is the last non-direct click goal conversion rate.
• The ecommerce conversion rate you see in the report is the last non-direct click e-commerce conversion rate.
• The revenue you see in the report is the last non-direct click revenue.

This custom report doesn’t show assisted conversions generated by your organic search campaign.

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Any conversion other than the last click conversion is an assisted conversion. 

We can never truly determine the true value of our SEO campaigns unless we don’t start analysing and reporting the role organic search campaign is playing in initiating and assisting conversions.

“ SEO not only helps in completing a conversion but also help in initiating and assisting the conversions which are completed by other marketing channels (like PPC, Email, Display, Direct, Referral etc.). “

Step-2: Navigate to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths Report and then create a new conversion segment called ‘The True value of SEO‘:

In this conversion segment, I am selecting all those ‘conversion paths’ in which ‘organic search’ was not the last interaction.

I use this conversion segment to determine the assisted conversions of my SEO campaign.

Universal Analytics, by default follows the last-click attribution model in multi-channel funnel reports. So in multi-channel funnel reports, you see conversion volumes and conversion values for conversion paths in which ‘organic search’ was the last click/interaction.

That is why in my conversion segment, I have excluded all those ‘conversion paths’ in which ‘organic search’ was the last interaction. This way, I can avoid reporting double counts of last-click conversion volumes and conversion values.

I have already reported last click conversion volumes and last click conversion values through the custom report I developed above.

Once you have applied this conversion segment to your ‘Top Conversions Path’ report, you will get an insight similar to the one below:

Here we can conclude that the SEO campaign assisted in additional 20k+ conversions (which are later completed by other marketing channels) whose value is more than $100k. You can’t get this type of insight through non-multi channel funnel reports like the custom report I created above.

Step-3: Since in multi-channel funnel reports, conversions include both goal conversions and ecommerce transactions, you should segment the conversion data further into ecommerce transactions and goal conversions:

Now we can see that out of 20k+ conversions, 467 are ecommerce transactions. These are the ecommerce transactions in which organic search didn’t directly complete but assisted in completing.

Without the assistance of organic search, these transactions would have never completed in the first place.

Now we want to determine the value of these e-commerce transactions. So I will unselect all of the goals and then click on the ‘Apply’ button:

Fig.1

Once you clicked on the apply button, you can then see the economic value of the ecommerce transactions which were assisted by organic search:

Now we can conclude that organic search helped in generating a revenue of $40,885 on top of the revenue of $260k (as reported by the custom report above).

Similarly, you can determine the true value of your PPC campaigns, display campaigns, email campaigns, etc.

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