Improve Organic Attribution

When we speak to clients about attribution, it’s always interesting to observe how many set up attribution actually to prove the value of paid media spend.

This is naturally a biased lens; if this is your approach, then there is no problem, and it’s completely fine, provided you also have additional attribution to give a balanced viewpoint.

If you want better insights into how organic search impacts your numbers, implement the following audience in GA4.

We’re seeing 20-30% uplifts for some of our clients to better show the value of organic within the overall conversion funnel.

The more data we can pull to prove the value of organic and reduce the reliance on paid media, the better. Over the next few months, our mission is to build more robust models to arm clients with additional data to give them better insights into organic and brand channels.

Steps are outlined here: https://open.substack.com/pub/seonovos/p/improve-organic-attribution and don’t forget to subscribe.

Pulse Event: SEO & CRM

If you are attending the Vervaunt’s Pulse event, say hello to team NOVOS as we’re sponsoring this year.

Day 1: 9th April - SEO Panel

Join our Delivery Director Dan, who is moderating a panel of experts on what to expect from “SEO in 2025 for brands.” With industry leaders from Dunelm, YuMove, and Samsung, the panel will discuss the ever-increasing importance of brands in organic strategies, how AI can be leveraged in search, and how some of the country’s biggest brands are prioritising their SEO strategies.

Day 2: 10th April - CRM Roundtable

We’re sponsoring the CRM roundtable, so join our CRM manager, Amelia, for a chat about all things CRM in eCommerce.

We’re sponsoring the event, so we will also be attending most of the side events and activities:

• VIP Cocktail Reception - Sam, Co-Founder, attending (9th April, from 17:30)

• Official Pre-Event Drinks Mixer - Tom and Mark, our Head of SEO and Head of PR, coincidently end up at a drinking event together (8th April, from 18:30)

• Fitness Class - Olivia, our Ops Director is attending (8th April, 13:30-15:00)

Tickets are still available; see the link below.

The Powerful Collision of Brand-PR & Digital PR – Our PR Expansion

We’re expanding our Digital PR offering to include Traditional PR services.

Why?

Close to 10 years ago, when ‘link building’ became a dirty word, the SEO industry pioneered the term “digital PR” However, over the past 3-4 years, particularly since COVID, more traditional PR agencies have started to operate online only, creating this strange convergence of the two industries.

We’ve been offering Digital PR for nearly 4 years and have found how much our clients rely on us for more traditional PR activity. In particular, TALA, we now use traditional PR reporting tools.

We also found that our work was a level above these other ‘Online only PR agencies,’ which still relied on a black book of contacts and continued to get the same coverage repeatedly.

With us, our USPs focus on:

• Consistently generating unique coverage across various activities, not just campaign-led each quarter

• Quantifiable metrics, particularly our in-house relevancy metric combined with brand sentiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other Chat Engines

• Relevancy: Our focus as an agency means that because we're targeting relevant publications, we're building the brand around the right sort of audience.

• Product-led PR: As part of our eCom specialism, we put a big emphasis on building your brand as an authority within your product categories, measured through the rise in Brand + Non-Brand search terms (e.g. TALA leggings)

• Helping to bridge the gap between performance teams and brand teams

  Working with one agency for Brand and Digital PR allows for a unified strategy, consistent brand messaging, and holistic performance tracking.

  Our approach builds brand authority, maximises organic performance, improves efficiency and allows the delivery of a performance-led PR strategy.

  If you’re interested in hearing more, drop us a message. We’d be happy to pull together a free ideation with entry-level pricing.

February Revenue Performance for eCommerce Brands

February was a mixed month for revenue. A strong start to the month saw YoY growth of nearly 3% and continued WoW. This growth was offset by poor end-of-month performance. If in doubt, blame the weather…

When we look at YoY revenue growth trend, February was a net-decline of just under 1%, the first YoY revenue drop in 5 months.

Total Market Performance

When we look at this trend across other industries, we can see that Health and Beauty continue to perform the best year over year. Clothing continues to perform poorly YoY, with its lowest decline since August.

Home and Garden saw a sharp drop in MoM, and revenue declined nearly 5% YoY.

Organic Shopping Revenue Growth

We found this data particularly interesting: Organic Shopping contributed 2% of fashion industry revenue in Q4 2024, compared to 6% from paid shopping.

The data shows paid shopping contributing 3x more revenue, but I’m sure the budget split is more like a 25x plus towards paid shopping. Furthermore, people trust organic over paid despite the lower investment from brands.

We wrote about the next iteration of Google Shopping here > https://thisisnovos.com/blog/7-takeaways-about-the-new-google-shopping/

Channel Benchmarking

If benchmarking is your thing, check out these snazzy charts, which show the overall channel contribution from eCommerce brands:

1. Organic Search Reduction

• Organic Search revenue contribution has decreased over time, especially from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024.

• This indicates increasing competition, algorithm changes, or brands shifting budgets to other channels.

• A key trend we’re on a mission to switch as paid ads are just getting more expensive, so you need to be reducing your reliance on these channels.

2. Paid Channels Are More Prominent

• Paid Search & Paid Shopping contributions have fluctuated but remain strong.

• Paid Social has increased, suggesting brands rely more on social advertising to drive conversions.

3. Rise in Cross-Network & Display Advertising

• Cross-network channels and display advertising have increased their share, highlighting an effort to diversify traffic sources.

• This suggests a shift toward multi-channel attribution strategies rather than reliance on a single paid platform.

4. Direct & Email Performance Stability

• Direct traffic has been fairly consistent, reflecting strong brand recall and returning customers.

• Email marketing remains a steady contributor, reinforcing its importance in customer retention.

5. SMS & Affiliates Stay Small but Relevant

• SMS marketing, though a smaller percentage, has held its ground, showing it still plays a niche role in conversions.

• Affiliates also maintain a stable presence, contributing to a performance-based revenue model for some brands.

Summary: Implications for eCommerce Brands

• Organic is becoming more competitive, requiring more effort in SEO and content marketing.

• Paid social and paid search investments are rising, meaning brands must optimise their paid media strategies for ROI.

• Diversification into email, SMS, and cross-network platforms is key to mitigating reliance on single sources.

When we overlay Traffic and Orders with this data, we can see that Organic Search and Direct play a key part in traffic driving and awareness but drop off in revenue due to the aggressive bottom-of-the-funnel nature of eCommerce brands paid media spend- hence the need for multiple attribution models showcasing multiple viewpoints to ensure you understand your funnel channel mix, as opposed to a single model that’s been created to prove the value of your media spend. More on this topic in the future as we’re building these models for a few clients now.

eCom Conversion Trends

When we break down CVR across departments, there doesn’t seem to be a big impact on Home & Garden, so based on the revenue data, it could imply a general decline in demand YoY for this category.

For this data, we’ve split out budget + mid-budget brands vs premium.

When we break out CVR for premium AOV, we can see that CVR has been trending down across most categories.

Google Changes to AI Overviews

This month, Google released two new features that largely went under the radar. Still, from an SEO perspective, they are potentially significant and give key insights into where Google is adapting to Chat behaviour.

1) Links added to AI overviews

Previously, we asked, "What is the point of getting into an AI overview?" If Google takes your content without directing traffic to your site, it becomes more of a brand play than an acquisition strategy. However, this month in the USA, Google has begun testing links within AI overviews. This means you can expect more traffic from these results, similar to how Featured Snippets worked. SEOs are incentivised to get clients featured in these summaries to gain more traffic and search visibility.

2) Google announces AI mode, kills “GEO”

Google announced a trial of “AI mode” as a new tab in Google. This aligns with our thinking at the start of the year, where we highlighted the rise in longer searches in Google. We could see a world where Google absorbs Gemini under the Google experience and, as a result, pushes users towards Google Shopping as a destination.

You can read about the recent change here: https://blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-search/ 

You can read about our chat vs search prediction here: https://seonovos.substack.com/p/chat-vs-search

Also, as predicted in our 2025 trends - this update has got the SEO community confirming the end of the term “GEO” - a term and trend a few smaller agencies tried to jump on: https://seonovos.substack.com/p/seo-ecommerce-predictions-for-2025