Track SEO Rankings – Yoast/Scholten with a twist of @analyticsgirl
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Nikki
3 years ago -
2815
views
Thanks to Andre Scholten from Traffic4u for writing this post at Yoast.com.
It provides us Google Analytics buffs with a great hack to enable us to see the position that our clients sites were on when they were clicked from Google’s SERPS (only works if Google are using the AJAX version of their search engine).
NOT THIS – “http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=andre+scholten&btnG=Zoeken&meta=cr%3DcountryNL&aq=f&oq=”
but like this
Andre’s method lets you see results shown like this in Google Analytics user-defined reporting interface.
However, we found that we needed to collect the data in a slightly different fashion so that the data could be presented as a group of #1 positions, #2 positions etc. as follows..
When you drilldown by pressing the position number, then sort by the keyword dimension (see below), you get a list of all the keywords that sent traffic for the number 1 position in SERPS.
How to do it.
1. Setup a profile on its own for this tracking.
2. Only include Organic Traffic
3. Next add a filter to only include Google Traffic
4. Then add a filter to capture the SERPS positions
Job Done!!
@analyticsgirl
17 comments so far to - Track SEO Rankings – Yoast/Scholten with a twist of @analyticsgirl -
Great job!
In case any of you get stuck (like I did for a few minutes on the | symbol its left shift and the backslash key)
:)
Have my profile setup and looking forward to the results!
Hi Rob
How are you?
Lol, it took me ages to find it too when I first started these…
You’ll LOVE the results!
Nikki
Hi Nicki, indeed just looking at the weekends results and its good to see these figures, however I’d say at least 80% of visits are made without using the AJAX versions of google, as they come up as “(not set)”. Thats with a primarily UK site, i’ll just check one of our global sites and come back and comment :)
Hi
There is a hack that can show you the page your site was on in SERPS when it was clicked, but that’s as close as you can get without Ajax.
However, we could assume a pattern of behaviour from the Ajax-enabled searches if it is s high volume traffic site, I think.
Nikki
Suggestions:
* You can do this in one filter rather than two.
* cd=1 is recorded for misspelling and related searches, so add a negative look ahead e.g (?!&oi=dont match this)
* if you want to only view google.co.uk positions just change (com|co.uk) to (co.uk) in the expression.
Referral ^https?://www.google.(com|co.uk)/([?#]hl=|search|webhp|url).*[?#&]cd=([1-9]|[1-9][0-9]|100)(?!&oi=(spell|revisions_inline|broad-revision|social_search|blog_result|microblog_result))
Medium ^organic$
UserDefined $A3
P.S. Also have you read alwaysbetesting post about storing SERP position using EventTracking and integer field, his script is called using seopositionplus.js
Do you want a job?
Nikki
Hiya Phil,
Just had a proper chance to look through your suggestions which are fab! I have set your suggested filter up and the event tracking to test.
Thanks for the heads up!!
Nikki Rae
Nikki, your a bloody genius, i only half understood this (from a social tracking perspective, as we have only just chatted about) but it’s very cool. I need to tinker with my lytics me tinks
Cheers Claire. You tinker away….
Nikki
Hmmm. I did everything as described and the data came in but where can I see the rankings? Can’t find or see those as of now.
Hi
You need to look in Visitors > User Defined.
Let me know if that doesn’t work.
Best
Nikki Rae
good stuffs Nikki…very informative and interesting.
thanx admin nice work well done
?amdan sat???
dü?ün organizasyonlar?
bursa dü?ün
I seem to find majestic seo works good for what it offers for free
Nikki,
Thanks for the great article. Wanted to get clarification on a couple of things.
1. I want to set up a separate profile? Do you mean register the site for a second profile on Google Analytics?
2. What is the exact string I should type in the last Filter to capture the SERPs positions? –
(?|&)cd=([^&]*)
?
Thanks so much for your help!
Chris
Hi Chris,
You don’t need to register for a differenct Google Analytics account – just ‘add profile’ to your existing account.
Also, the string is (\?|&)cd=([^&]*)
Best
Nikki Rae
Thanks for this post, I’ve been running the filter on a couple of different profiles. I’m going to test Phil’s solution against yours starting today on my personal domain too.
I’ve been getting quite a few (not set) instead of a ranking. Do you know what would cause that?