Help: Blog traffic to Commercial website: correct dimensions?

Hi, I’d like to run this by you, HELP/INSIGHT/COMMENT would be appreciated.

We want to see how much traffic our blog sends to main commercial / documentation site: as visitors.

We don’t care whether returning visitor or not. We just want to know how effective the blog is to send traffic to commercial (just excluding visitors who actually want to login in our tool)

We have the following dimensions filtered in the custom report:

  1. We want the blog to be the session entry url. Just count sessions where visitors get to us via blog, as discovery asset.

  2. Session time > 10 secs, because it’s a way to filter out unqualified visits.

  3. Custom event category = exclude Login. To filter out those who actually log in in our tool.

  4. Next page view url - not containing blog. Because we think this is the way to know that they landed on commercial website or documentation and not yet another article.

  5. Next page view url - contains signup. Because some visitors might go from a blog article directly to our signup page, which has a different domain/url

  6. Session entry doesn’t contain preview. Because I was noticing that our own visits on our wordpress preview urls when drafting articles were also being picked by Piwik (?)

Question is:

Should we add another OR dimension that says:
Session exit url doesn’t contain /blog/

To me if we do this: I’d say we’d be ruling out visitors who land on our blog, go to our website, go back to blog and then, for instance, close browser. Is this correct?
To me, we don’t care for this KPI where in the touch point journey / session the commercial website was visited.

What do you think?

Thank you!

Hi!

Yes, you would be ruling out these visitors, but you mentioned that your goal is to see how many people the blog sends to the commercial site. Adding the session exit URL condition is not needed for that, unless you specifically want to focus on visitors who didn’t go back to the blog site.

Have you considered creating a funnel for this case? You could specify the steps (visiting blog, visiting your main website and visiting a signup page) and filter out the login traffic as well.

1 Like

Thank you @sararekowska for replying. Indeed, session exit = blog doesn’t make any sense for the purpose of this report. This is not a linear funnel, the typical ecommerce cart for instance. That’s not the goal of our blog. So thank you for sharing your view here.