Google Analytics customisations you cannot live without #1

If you like tweaking Google Analytics for your specific needs, this 2-part series is for you… Essentially, these hacks/plugins address two area that Google Analytics cannot do:

  1. Better SEO tracking – regionalised Search Engine visits – this post
  2. Automatic tracking of file downloads and outbound links follow-up post

The first is an major limitation for Search Marketers requiring regional search engine detail for SEO campaigns; The second is a real pain in the bum for webmasters of content heavy websites who need to track non-standard click throughs (file downloads, mailto, outbound links).

However, Google Analytics is a very flexible product and a little bit of custom JavaScript can go a long way – so I have developed JavaScript plugins to over come these limitations…

Better SEO Tracking – Country specific Search Engines

Regional differences are important – for example, if you are conducting SEO for a North American audience, knowing if visitors come to your site via a search on google.com, google.ca or google.co.mx can be very important to you. More so in Europe, which is a more fragmented market: google.co.uk, google.de, google.fr etc., and the same for the Middle East, Asia, Asia-Pacific and so on. Essentially, if your SEO is targeting different countries, understanding regional differences is a key requirement of your work.

Google Analytics tracks 40 search engines, in aggregate. That is, all google domains are tracked as a single entity – “google”. The same for Yahoo, Bing and all the search engines it tracks by default. So you don’t know if a visitor from a Google search came form google.com or google.co.uk – or any other google/yahoo/bing domain…

Customising the Search Engine Report

Although adding a new search engine is straightforward in GA, managing a large list is cumbersome. This JavaScript extension does all the hard work for you and is fully maintained and updated by me. Just add 1 line of code to your pages:

Find out more about this Extension >>

264 search domains tracked…! Summary of features:

  • Tracks visitors from 189 regional Google domains – and their keywords
  • Tracks visitors from 30 regional Yahoo domains – and their keywords
  • Tracks visitors from Google Maps, News, and Video search – and their keywords
  • Tracks visitors from 46 other search engines that are not available in GA: e.g. BBC, Tesco, Maktoob (Arabic), Naver (Korea), HotBot, zinza (Arabic), Rambler (Russian), ukr.net (Ukraine), others…
  • Adds price comparison engines kelkoo.com, pricegrabber.com

NOTE: These are all in addition to the GA defaults (40 search domains). Check out the full list of tracked search engines and domains (growing all the time).

Sample report view before applying this extension:

SEO-before.png

Sample report view after applying this extension:

SEO-after.png

As you can see, there is a great deal more regional information when you deploy this script. Installation is straightforward.

Find out more about this Extension >>


Read part 2 of this seriesautomatic tracking of file downloads and outbound links

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