When relying on search engine optimisation for your affiliate sites it helps if you can understand, analyse and make decisions based on the data you have for your sites. Google Analytics is a fantastic package for presenting your data regarding traffic to your site but it doesn’t offer everything you need right out of the box. But don’t worry Google Analytics is totally customizable and allows you to create filters and use expressions to get the data you need.
Some of the most important metrics I believe required to monitor your SEO efforts would be the ability to monitor Keywords, Rankings and Landing Pages. This data can always be manipulated with “Links to your site” data from Webmaster Central to monitor effects of link building.
There have been a couple of solutions on how to do this on the internet. Yoast had a post on how to track what page of google traffic came from along with keywords. This was good but it was still a bit awkward to read, i.e. the ranking report displays page 1 results as unset, (page: ), page 2 results as (page: 10) or (page: 11). Damon Gudaitis wrote a post on how to use Yoasts technique but how to make it more presentable, i.e. Page 1, Page 2, etc.
Again this was better but not quite there, it wasn’t actually tracking the ranking position. But then Google modified it’s referrer string for search queries and this was spotted by Patrick Altoft who immediatley realised it was now possible to track ranking positions.
Expanding on Patricks information using an example from James Morell, I’m going to show you how to setup Analytics to track keyword, ranking and landing page:
- Create a new profile in Google Analytics, and call it something like ‘SERP result and landing page.’
- Hit ‘Edit’ and add a new filter. There will be four filters in total.
- The first filter is for Google Traffic only. Set it up as follows
Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Include’ radio button
Select Campaign Source in the Filter Field dropdown
Type ‘google’ into the Filter Pattern
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons
- Next, Create another filter called ’search term and rank filter’
Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Advanced’ radio button
Select Campaign Term in the Field A -> Extract A box. Enter (.*) in the text box
Select Referral in the Field B -> Extract B box. Enter (\?|&)(cd)=([^&]*) in the text box
Select Custom Field 1 in the Output To -> Constructor box. Enter $A1 | rank: $B3 in the text box
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field A Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field B Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Override Output Field’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons
- Create a filter called ‘landing page’ to search for the landing page people are getting to:
Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Advanced’ radio button
Select Referral in the Field A -> Extract A box. Enter (\?|&)(url)=([^&]*) in the text box
Leave the Field B -> Extract B box empty.
Select Custom Field 2 in the Output To -> Constructor box. Enter $A3 in the text box
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field A Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Field B Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Override Output Field’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons
- Finally, merge the last two filters together with one called ‘keyword, rank and landing page.’
Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Advanced’ radio button
Select Custom Field 1 in the Field A -> Extract A box. Enter (.*) in the text box
Select Custom Field 2 in the Field B -> Extract B box. Enter (.*) in the text box
Select User Defined in the Output To -> Constructor box. Enter $A1, LP: $B1 in the text box
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field A Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field B Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Override Output Field’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons
To get value out of this report, go to Traffic sources, Keywords and select User Defined Value in the Dimension drop down. This will give you something like this once it has run for a few days:
So try it for yourself and see if it helps in monitoring your SEO efforts!
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