photo credit: manfrys

Google is powerful – possibly the most powerful website out there today. Its effect on the internet is tremendous. More importantly, it’s affect on how a person uses the internet has been quite interesting. Two key things that I’d like to point out about Google’s effect on the internet are: Direct Navigation (as defined by the most recent WAA standardized metrics report) channel shifts and a user’s onsite search usage.

Many Fortune 500 (established) sites today have seen drops in their Direct Navigation visitor channel vs. their previous year’s data as a percent to total (data taken from Coremetrics Benchmark Report August 2009 vs. 2008 – metric Direct Load % of total traffic). In many cases you can see a gradual decreasing trend line if you trend out this data over the last few years. This trend might perplex an analyst or forecaster mining this data. A major reason for concern over this is that there probably isn’t a direct correlation of an increase in another marketing channel such as paid search. However, here’s what is happening: people are lazy, and there are an increasing number of the tools that you can use to easily access a page however, these are possibly being mis-counted as something other than Direct Load. To avoid confusion, direct load (direct navigation per the WAA) means the user entered the URL or selected it from a list of bookmarks. If a user does anything else to enter your site they are not direct loading/navigating.

The Direct Load/Navigation channel is typically the largest marketing channel for your visitors, assuming you are an established website. As well, it typically has a better conversion than your paid marketing channels. Thus, it could be concerning for you if your largest channel is shifting downward as a percent to total traffic. As I noted above, many times there is not typically one corresponding marketing channel seeing an upshot as a percent to total. The reason for this is that there is an ever growing amount of tools that you can use to enter a site. RSS, blogs, social media sites, and even your navigation bar are all tools a user can use to “navigate” to your site, but are not necessarily paid links, nor natural search links, and while they might be considered a portal, they are probably not accurately defined in your Marketing report. (Aside: a user can type in a key term into their navigation bar instead of typing www and .com and the browser will redirect to that site if it is recognizable enough. This is a service provided by the default search engine for your browser. My question is, this is not typing in the URL, but rather using the navigation bar as a search engine, so is it a “Natural Search” click? Further, one out of every ten times the browser cannot redirect and thus takes you to a search page where you can choose the link you want from a list; again is this paid/natural search?)

What you will probably see in your data is upticks in Natural Search and Portals but they still may not match up exactly with the decrease in Direct Load/Navigation. The bigger question is: is your conversion suffering because of this phenomenon?

Onsite search is typically a very powerful tool on your website, if you utilize it properly. Meaning if you carefully monitor the words visitors are searching on and ensuring that results are provided for as many words possible you’ll keep visitors engaged with your site and probably increase your conversion and sales. Keeping up with the latest technology, such as predictive search tools, advanced search options and the fastest and best search servers, will also be a boon to your visitor’s experience. What you cannot control is how and when visitors utilize your onsite search box.

An interesting phenomenon I’ve heard about is spikes in search terms when said term is a featured item or brand, etc. For instance, maybe you have just released the latest Widget X10 line and it is featured on your Home Page. You might see a spike in sessions typing “Widget X10” into your search box. Again, my first thought is that users are inherently lazy. Further maybe Google has made them lazy because they are used to getting a quick result and a direct link to what they are looking for when they search on something. Thus even though, the user knows that they could click on a link on the Homepage and explore your Widget X10 display, they type in the keyword and go right to the product, or at least to a list of items to choose from. One might take away that maybe the navigation is too cumbersome, or maybe there are too many clicks to go through to get to a product page, and this could very well be the case. Again, there is merit in thinking this and as well, it may be worth exploring whether you should have a robust Home Page/Landing page, or whether you should take more of a “Google” approach. We discuss this option in our book.