05/23 /// Google Tests “Ads Related to” Notation Above PPC Ads

05/23 /// Disney, Las Vegas Top Searched Travel Destinations in Early 2012

05/23 /// 8 Apps Every Writer Should Have

May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008

• Complete Archives

AdHack

Search Marketing News

Annoyances

Black Hat SEO Techniques

Other Resources & Links

Blogging & RSS Promotion

Canadian Search Community

eMarketing 101 General

Francouver

Free Webcast

eMarketing 101 Projects

Google *Stuff*

eMarketing 101 Promotion

Link Building Best Practices

Music

Musique (Francophone)

Video Content

PPC Planning

Personal

Search Engines Market Share

Search Marketing Smile

SEM Studies & Research

SEM Whitepaper & Reports

SEM & Usability Experiments

SEM Local Events

SEO Advices for Beginners

SEO Planning for Beginners

Spectacular SEM Results

Vacation

Vision & Future Trends

ROI & Results

Web Analytics

Web Copywriting

Web Strategy Partners

White Hat SEO Techniques

• Category Archives

Out of my Gord - By Gord Hotchkiss

GrokDotCom - By Brian Eisenberg

Link Building Best Practices Blog

Search Engine Watch

SEM Hints: Search Engine Marketing Hints, Tips & Tools For Online Businesses

Search Engine Land - by Danny Sullivan

Virtual Marketing Blog: Internet Marketing News, Reviews and Insights

Search Insider

SEMPO Global Search Marketing Blog

ClickZ Online Marketing News

Pandia Search Engine News

Search Marketing Expo News

SEMPO Canada Search Marketing Blog

SiteProNews SEO Blog

• Complete Blog List

Main RSS feed

Jobs feed

/// Posted by Alexandre Brabant on Wednesday, September 29, 2010

How to Turn Google Analytics Into Your Own Rank Tracker using Custom Variables

From: google.com

Posted by MikeCP

Today I want to talk about tracking organic ranking in Google Analytics. Previously, we were able to determine the page from which a Google organic click was coming from (detailed on the Distilled blog by Will Critchlow). This was nice because we could append this to the end of our keywords in Google Analytics for some interesting data (André Scholten’s post at Yoast.com has a step by step) as seen below.

Keyword Page Rankings
Image courtesy of Yoast.com

This solution provides limited utility, and if you’re like me, you implemented it, maybe checked it out once in a while, but never really turned this into actionable or otherwise meaningful data. I’m going to detail how rank tracking in Google Analytics can be made a lot more useful thanks to custom variables and a change in Google’s referring URLs. But first…

Some History

When Google began testing an AJAX search interface in early 2009 there was a flurry of concern that it could mean the end of traditional rank tracking, web analytics packages, and I’m sure someone said SEO was dead, too. The concern wasn’t without merit; Google was serving results in AJAX with the URL pattern as http://www.google.com/#q=keyword, and most analytics packages ignored the hash and everything after.

Fast forward to September 8th, when Google introduced Google Instant. The AJAX SERP usage had been steadily increasing over time, but shot up in usage when Instant was rolled out. Fortunately for Omniture, WebTrends, and other third party analytics packages, Google worked out a way to pass the referrer information from the SERPs, rank tracking still works, and I’m still working as an SEO in a living industry.

As it turns out, Google includes even more information in the AJAX SERPs than they previously did, including one really interesting parameter: “cd=”. The <em>cd=</em> parameter contains the <em>exact ranking position</em> of the search listing, which makes for some really awesome possibilities, especially when paired with Google Analytics’ custom variables.</p> <h3>Why Custom Variables?</h3> <p>Custom variables are a bit of an enigma to even advanced Analytics users. I’ll admit that I never really made much use of them in the past. You’ll often see examples where custom variables are used to track logged in vs. unlogged in users, which is definitely a great use. Rob Ousbey’s <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/miscellaneous/6-cool-things-you-can-do-with-google-analytics-custom-variables/">6 cool things YOU can do with custom variables is a good set of examples to get your feet wet.

In André Scholten’s example above we’re using Google Analytics user defined value, isn’t that just as good a custom variable? Well, the difference depends on how you intend on using your data. With custom variables, you’re granted much more flexibility within Google Analytics for slicing and dicing data. For instance, through the use of either custom reporting or advanced segments with custom variables, I can pretty easily track how much revenue a keyword has brought in when ranked in the 2nd position, as opposed to the 4th. While this may be possible with the user defined variable, it would require quite a bit of work after an excel data dump.

Now, let’s get to business:

The How

Getting this properly set up was remarkably easy for me, and I have so very little programming knowledge, so I would imagine most wouldn’t have much issue. I used PHP, as I was working with a WordPress site, but I’m sure you crazy hackers can do the same in most any language.

Step One - Extract cd= Value from Referrer String

I used this snippet to do this.

<?php preg_match("/cd\=(\d+)/",$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $matches);
$str = $matches[0];
preg_match("/(\d+)/",$str,$matches);
$rank = $matches[0] ?>

Please don’t make fun of my hacky coding

This assigns the cd= value to the $rank variable. We’ll reference this in…

Step 2 - Call cd= Value in our Google Analytics snippet

Now, we want to insert the custom variable call between the setAccount and trackPageview lines in our Analytics snippet (shown below using the asynchronous code):

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Google_Rank','$rank',2]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);"

We’ve set the custom variable slot to 1, and the scope to the session-level (the last argument, set as 2). If you are already making use of custom variables, be sure to not overwrite a previously occupied slot. For more information on how the custom variable is formatted, see Google’s help page on the topic.

Step 3 - Create an IF Statement so the CustomVar isn’t Called Every Time

We only want to include this line when we have a cd= value, otherwise every new click will overwrite the last value. To do this, I used the following IF statement, again coded in PHP. This is the final step, and the complete Google Analytics snippet:

<?php if ($rank != '' ) {
echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">\n var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'Google_Rank','$rank',2]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);";
echo "\n"; }
else {
echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\">\n var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);"; }
echo "\n";
?> (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s[removed].insertBefore(ga, s); })(); </script>

Here we’re checking if $rank has a value. If it does, we’ll include the custom variable call with that $rank value, if not, we’ll print the Google Analytics code as normal. Also included in the above are some line breaks (\n), so that the code formats correctly.

The Most Important Part - Analyzing Our Data

What’s the point of going through all this effort if it doesn’t provide you with any analytical insight? None, of course. But this rank tracking solution has some added benefits over the traditional rank tracking software that may be really useful to some SEOs. These include:

Rankings by City, Region, Country

Traditional rank tracking software suffers in that its ranking results are dependent on the location of the servers. With custom variable rank tracking and a little spreadsheet pivot table magic it’s pretty easy to get your site’s rank for any location.

Historical, Definite, Data

Once this is properly set up you’ve got access to definite rankings within your Analytics data from that point on. So as holiday season 2011 rolls around, its easy enough to review where your site ranked during the 2010 holidays, helping to set budgets, goals, and expectations.

Bounce Rate/eCommerce Data/etc. by Rank

Whatever your KPI, you can compare it against search ranking. Reporting the ROI of link building efforts or on site optimization becomes much easier when you’ve got rankings included in your dataset.

Some of the quick ideas I had around this include:

Average rank over time for top 50 keywords
Average rank over time for 4+ word keyphrases
Bounce rate for 2nd+ page clicks
Revenue % increase for Keyword X when ranking increases from 2 to 1

I should note that getting averages is a lot easier in Excel with a pivot table, as seen below:

Average rank pivot table
This can also be adjusted to show your minimum rank, as well

Creating Custom Reports and Advanced Segments

Custom variables aren’t included in the default reports for Google Analytics, so unless you do all your work in Excel, you’ll probably want to create some custom reports or advanced segmentation to work with the data directly in Analytics.

Advanced segmentation is great for this data. Below is the function one would use to track rankings between 11 and 15, which might be strong candidates for on-page optimization that could provide the boost onto the first page:

Advanced Segmentation
You can apply this particular advanced segment with this link.

The Downsides

The most obvious downside is that you’re only receiving a ranking when a listing is being clicked on, so for very small sites there may be limited utility. Ranking data will be spotty past the 2nd page, as well.

Additionally, the AJAX SERPs are not being served to all users in all locations. Small sample size warning here, but I’m seeing about 40% of organic Google traffic coming from the AJAX SERPs (done through a simple calculation of visits with our custom variable divided by total Google organic visits over the same time period). Michael Whitaker is seeing this number over 50% in his data. This number is likely going to increase as Instant is rolled out further.

The #-pack local listings can really throw things off, too. If a particular query gets one of these to start the SERP, the cd= continues after:

cd= rankings

Lastly, there does exist the possibility that Google discontinues its use of the cd= variable for whatever reason.

Go Analyze

I hope some of you can make some good use out of this functionality. I’ve only had it installed on my sites for a short time, but I’ve definitely found it interesting to play around with. If you don’t already have Excellent Analytics installed in your Excel I would highly recommend doing so, even if you don’t implement this tracking, and especially if you do.

I’d like to thank Michael Whitaker of Monitus for his help. He’s been installing this setup for his clients for a bit now. Monitus offers proper eCommerce Google Analytics installation for Yahoo! stores, which is surprisingly difficult without Monitus.

If you’ve got any other ideas for working with this data, sound off in the comments or let me know on Twitter @MikeCP. Personally, I’m really excited to have this data rolling in and the possibilities are nearly endless. I’ll be sure to report any interesting ways to manipulate the data in future blog posts. Cheers!

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/XyE68emin-o/tracking-organic-ranking-in-google-analytics-with-custom-variables