Jon Clark is a Internet Marketing Consultant specializing in Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This search marketing blog serves as a backdrop for educational search marketing conversation as well as a resource for cutting edge (and free) Internet Marketing tools to make all of our lives as search marketers easier!
Showing posts with label google analytics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google analytics. Show all posts
So, there are many ways to tracking keyword rankings. There are paid tools like Web Position-which was recently blocked by Google for a short period. There are free tools like Exact Factor - but the tool is limited to 9 keywords it can track. Market Samurai, one of the hottest SEO tools available is also a viable option for tracking keyword rankings. Because of these reasons as well as others, it makes sense to track rankings at the source - Google Analytics. I originally found the idea behind tracking seo rankings with google analytics at Yoast.com but decided to repost with some additional detail based on the questions I had while trying to implement.
So, the first steps are to setup a filter in Google Analytics. There will be a total of 3 filters needed to implement this Google Analytics SEO tracking. Filter 1 and 2 will take care of filtering out everything other than organic traffic. The 3rd will provide the tracking filter. This is important: you will also have to create a new profile to apply these filters to otherwise it will screw up your main profile's tracking! Now, onto the filters!
Filter 1: Google Analytics SEO Keyword Tracking
This filter will allow only Organic traffic into the profile. Create a new filter, choose filter type "custom filter". Then choose the "include" option, set the filter field on "Campaign Medium" and the filter pattern on "organic". A screenshot is below:
Filter 2: Google Analytics SEO Keyword Tracking
The second filter tells Google Analytics to capture traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN. Create a new filter, choose filter type "custom filter". Then choose the "include" option, set the filter field on "Campaign Source" and filter pattern on "googleliveyahoo".
Filter 3: Google Analytics SEO Keyword Tracking
Set up the 3rd filter as an advanced filter like so-->
The SEO Keyword Ranking Results:
After a while the "User Defined" report will look like this (ignore the language):
What you see are not the actual rankings, but the number of the first result of the page the keyword was on. So when you see 20, it means the keyword was on the third page, and a 50 means the sixth page. (Yahoo and Live Search will report 21 and 51 in stead of 20 and 50).
There were a number of questions in the comments surrounding about not seeing a number but only "(page: ): it means the keyword was on the first page - a good thing:)
Got any additional tips? Suggestions? Share in the comments!
If any of you have utilized your Google analytics account to track PPC programs outside of Google Adwords you have no doubt run into a tracking issue or two. Here is a quick run-down of how to get your URLs tagged appropriately in order to track accurately:
Data from Google AdWords is automatically included in your Analytics reports (assuming you have AdWords and Analytics linked). For your 3rd party PPC campaigns, the “how” is pretty simple. First, go to Google’s URL Builder tool, and enter the destination URL from your ad texts (i.e. landing page). From here you can enter the five parameters that will become your URL tag.
utm_source: This is the name of the search engine or the source of traffic (i.e. Yahoo, MSN, email newsletter, blue banner ad).
utm_medium: This is how you tell Analytics what type of traffic your source is (i.e. cpc, email, banner).
utm_term: This is where you detail keywords! This can be manually entered or dynamically generated with Yahoo’s {OVKEY} or MSN’s {QueryString} parameters.
utm_content: Consider this the ad variation or ad group. You choose how detailed you want to get. Typically, I designate this as the ad group for my PPC campaigns.
utm_campaign: If the name isn’t obvious enough – this is where you designate the name of your campaigns!
Once the tool gives you the fully tagged URL, all you need to do is copy and paste that URL into your ad texts. Google Analytics will do the rest of the work for you and begin giving you keyword level data for all of your PPC campaigns!
Have any additional tips? Please feel free to add in the comments!
Personally, I am a big fan of Google Analytics and have written a few posts in the past on tips and tricks. I was excited, to read the official Google Analytics Blog announcing the new Google Analytics for Blogger reporting interface. Currently available only in private beta, this product is a collaboration of several teams and marks the transition of Measure Map customers to a new Google Analytics interface designed specifically for Blogger users.
Per Google representative, Jeff Veen:
We'll be refining the new interface throughout the year before we release it to the general public as an optional reporting interface in both Blogger and Google Analytics accounts. In the meantime, you can always use Google Analytics to track your blog.
In the past, we've often mentioned Google Analytics as a great tool that helps you learn more about how visitors reach your website and what they do once they get there. But now's a good time to take a step back and talk about how to get started with Google Analytics from the very first step. The Google Analytics Blog is providing a series of "Analytics 101" articles that will walk you through sign up, installation, and using reports.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free, hosted web analytics service that provides useful data for website and marketing optimization. Site owners and marketers can make better informed decisions about their sites and campaigns by using metrics from Google Analytics reports. Google Analytics works by collecting information about your site traffic and advertising campaigns, combining this with e-commerce and conversion information to provide insight into the performance of your marketing efforts and site content.
Anyone can sign up using a Google account by visiting http://www.google.com/analytics/. You don't even need to have an AdWords account beforehand.
How do I sign up and install Google Analytics?
After signing up for a Google Analytics account comes the most important part of installation -- the tracking code snippet. Every Analytics user is given a unique piece of JavaScript code to insert in all site pages immediately before the </body> tag. The code snippet may look like something like this example below:
Your "UA-#####-#" number will be unique to you. It's important to insert the code on all of your site's pages; otherwise Analytics won't be giving you the whole picture of what's going on.
If you're not ready to insert the code now, you can always retrieve this code later. Depending on the size of your site and the number of pages you need tagged, you may want to discuss installation with your webmaster, if you have one.
How do I view my reports?
After you've finished signup, you'll be taken to the Analytics Settings page. The Status box on the right side of this page will let you know whether the code has been properly inserted. It's important to note, however, that it takes anywhere from a few hours to a full day after code installation for your reports to start gathering and showing information.
Once the Status box in the Analytics Settings page says that you're receiving data, you can click the View Reports link to receive reports about your website traffic.
That's it for this first installment of Google Analytics 101. Try playing around with a few reports. If you want to learn more right away, the Analytics Help Center is a great resource for information. Look for the next installment soon, when we'll explain more about administering your account and using your reports.
"All Google Analytics accounts worldwide now have access to a beta feature that graphs two different metrics against each other and see how they correlate. This new graphing ability enhances the insights available to Google Analytics users about visitor trends on their websites: for example, does a higher number of visitors correspond to a higher bounce rate? Do visitors who come to a website through AdWords spend more or less time on the site than visitors overall?
In addition, Google Analytics now supports ga.js, a new page tag that enables site owners to use the most up-to-date tracking functionality as it is added to Google Analytics. For instance, the ga.js page tag allows the site owner to streamline e-commerce tracking.
To better serve users worldwide, Google Analytics is also available in six additional languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25. The new languages are Thai, Filipino, Indonesian, Czech, Hungarian, and Portuguese (Portugal). Users all 25 languages can access the Google Analytics Help Center and receive online support in their supported language of choice."
