Blind Five Year Old

In February, Matt Cutts referenced a parameter in AJAX based Google search results that would let you track the rank of that result. Sure enough, it’s there and with just a little bit of know how you can track keyword rank in Google Analytics.

Tracking Rank in Google Analytics

At first glance you might think that tracking keyword rank would be tough to implement, but it’s really not. Here’s an easy step-by-step guide to capturing keyword rank in Google Analytics.

Create a New Google Analytics Profile

Simply click on Analytics Settings within Google Analytics. You must be a Google Analytics administrator to do this.

At the bottom, find and click on Add Website Profile.

You want to Add a Profile for an existing domain and then select the domain and enter a Profile Name. I suggest something easy and descriptive like “Google Rank”.

When you’re done you’ll see a new profile appear in your Analytics Settings list. Don’t worry if you see a yellow triangle with an exclamation point in the Status column. The tracking for a new profile takes a bit of time to populate. As long as the current tracking for that domain is working, this will take care of itself.

Create Profile Filters

Click the Edit link next to your new profile so you can create three filters. The first ensures this profile will only report organic traffic.

The second ensures this profile will only report Google traffic.

The third one is a bit more complicated and involves capturing the keyword rank using a regular expression in an Advanced Filter.

If the picture isn’t clear enough you want to enter: (\?|&)cd=([0-9]+)

All the regular expression is doing is looking for that special parameter (?cd= or &cd=) in the URL and then capturing the number (aka rank) after the cd= and using it in the User Defined field. You might be able to get away with just &cd=([0-9]+) but smart folks like Yoast are using both. I did a quick test and captured that data ($A1) and found 100% of it to be the ampersand (&). That said, I recommend covering your bases and match on both.

Remember to be sure to use $A2 since the number 2 refers to the second parenthesis where you’re capturing rank. If you’re interested (like I was) the advanced filters help on Google isn’t a bad read and this regex cheat sheet is a nice reference as well.

That’s it! Really, you’re done.

Wait and Review Your Keyword Ranking Reports

You’ll have to wait a day for the data to be collected since filters are not retroactive.

Wake up the next day and visit your new Google Rank profile. You’ll need to navigate to the User Defined section under Visitors. Once you click User Defined you’ll hopefully see a clean keyword ranking report. The (not set) value at the top indicates that no rank was captured, most likely because it was not an AJAX search result.

Now, there are other ways to configure these filters to combine keyword and rank, or exclude non-AJAX URLs. I’ve chosen to do it this way because I find it easier to view and more flexible in creating additional filters and custom reports. That’s not to say that you couldn’t create yet another profile to try different filter variations. Don’t be afraid to try (and break) things until you figure it out.

In my next post I’ll show you some ways to configure ranking reports and gain additional keyword insight.

Sometimes you want to see your Google Analytics traffic faster. Whether you’re obsessive, impatient, troubleshooting or benchmarking, you might find yourself frustrated with the 3-4 hour time lag, particularly if it’s a site with a decent amount of traffic.

Stop Waiting for Google Analytics Traffic

Here’s a quick and easy tip to see your Google Analytics traffic faster. (Remember, this only works if you’re looking at intraday traffic.)

Go to the Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits report in Google Analytics. Then make sure you’re looking at the graph by hour. The report will look something like this.

Now, in the far right select the Advanced Segments drop down and choose one of the default segments. My favorite is Non-paid Search Traffic. Then deselect All Visits so only Non-paid Search Traffic is checked. The result? You get a peek at a few more hours of traffic.

You can leave All Visits on to see the difference between the two if you’re really interested. For me, it’s all about looking at the day’s traffic in comparison to the same day last week. Using the same report with All Visits you get something like this.

Look at just Non-paid Search Traffic and you get to see those most recent hours. This is the report if you’re serious about SEO.

You can use any of the default advanced segments and can usually use any custom advanced segment that produces enough traffic. So stop refreshing your dashboard stats again and again without success. Instead, follows these few steps and get ahead of the curve.

Twitter is using Google Analytics

Earlier this month Twitter launched new HTML versions of their Follower and Direct Message emails. Upon clicking through one of these newly designed emails you’ll notice that the links all contain Google Analytics parameters.

For those of you without the best eyesight, the URL contains the normal utm_ parameters. In this case Twitter is using source=follow, medium=email and campaign=twitter20080331162631.

What is twitter20080331162631?

It is not a user id since a Google search for twitter20080330062631 shows results for more than one user. The first part looks like a date, but March 31, 2008 seems like an odd choice for something just released. Any ideas?

Why is Twitter using Google Analytics?

The obvious answer is Twitter wants more accurate or easily accessible metrics. But why select Google Analytics? Sure it’s free but Twitter isn’t hurting for money, are they? Twitter could use any number of other solutions.

Many believe Twitter is a Google competitor and/or acquisition target which makes using Google Analytics more intriguing.

Wouldn’t Twitter be just a little bit paranoid that Google would peek at the Google Analytics data to gain insight into their business? Sure it’s not supposed to happen but … why take the chance?

Or is Twitter using Google Analytics to provide due diligence data to Google for a potential acquisition? Google certainly wouldn’t doubt numbers generated by their own product. Is this part of the rumored negotiations taking place between Google and Twitter?

Google Killer or Google Accomplice

Outside of the conspiracy theories, Twitter’s usage of Google Analytics further cements them as the leader in the analytics space, surpassing competitors such as Omniture and Coremetrics.

PowerPoint decks at conferences are peppered with Google Analytics graphs and screen captures. In a difficult economic environment it becomes more and more difficult to rationalize using a paid product when a free product has a similar feature set.

Twitter isn’t a Google killer. Instead it’s helping Google to kill web analytics providers.