Essential Google Analytics Profiles for SEO

Well the title of this post may read a little greater than it is but what I will say is that this post will include some revolutionary Google Analytic filters. I can’t take the credit I didn’t write them so i will shows some link love to the original posts, however I have read the posts, implemented the filters and added my own spin as always.

So if you’ve seen these before then good for you, if not then your day is about to change so much for the better.

Google Analytics Profiles
Best practice for Google Analytics is setting up various profiles, this is done so when ever you manipulate the core data you have this separated from the original. (This standard Google post talks about why you should set up separate profiles.)

So in my mind I thought if I was starting with a new client or site what profiles would I want to set up?

Profiles Summery

• Standard Profile (No filters)
• Organic Filter with Ranking Correlation – http://yoast.com/new-seo-reports-for-google-analytics/
• Set up Universal Search filters – http://garmahis.com/tips/google-analytics/
• Track Google Map clicks – http://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/04/09/tracking-local-search-traffic-with-analytics/
• Set up detailed PPC keyword data – This allows you to track what keywords brought visitors in from broad match Phrase in your ad campaigns http://garmahis.com/tips/google-analytics/

Above are the 5 standard profiles I would set up as a standard Google Analytics setup. There are other filters which I might use but they are on a per case basis.

Google Ranking Reports – Why doesn’t Google Analytics do this anyway? Oh because it’s to do with SEO!

I have given the links to the original resources above but I’m going to extend the section on Google rankings in Google Analytics. This to me is simply one of the best filters created for Google Analytics in a long time. For SEO’s that see the benefit in this it is overwhelming , well lets explain why.

Firstly big thanks to the people involved with creating this report:

• Yoast – http://yoast.com/ for giving the guys the guest blog opportunity with his site. (Who said guest blogging was just for links!)
• André Scholten – He was the first person to create the ranking filter for analytic’s.
• Reinout Wolfert for his article on creating an advance segment for looking at the first page keyword versus overall traffic and how this increases over time.

Now the thank you’s are out of the way lets look at putting this filter in place.

Implementing the filter

Step One: Create a new profile and align it to your website.
Step two: Add a filter to only use Organic Traffic.

Step three: Add a filter to only use Google Traffic.

Step four: Now add a filter to give every referral from Google Organic searches a ‘start’ parameter.

Step five: Now add the actual SEO ranking filter.

Step Six: Complete.

We now have the filter in place and very soon analytic’s will be pulling in the data so the big questions now are where do I find the data in Google Analytics and how can I use it?

Where to find the data!
You need to drill down through your analytic’s as follows:

• Dashboard
• Traffic Sources
• Keywords
• User defined Value

The best way to do this is on the keyword screen keep the first column as “keyword” and make the second drop down as “User defined Value”.

Advanced ways of using the information

Well the first image to look at is below this shows one and half days worth of data but you can clearly see the yellow link indicating the number of visit from first page listings. Now if you do this over months of your SEO campaign you can then see with a quick visual if you are getting more visitors from your 1st page rankings i.e. potentially more first page rankings.

Really getting down to business

So we now have everything setup and we’ve been gathering data, let export it into excel and have some fun!
Depending on how many keywords or results you have to export you may need to add the following code to URL:


&limit=50000


This allows you to export up to 50000 rows from analytics into excel. Bear in mind that it will still only display 500.

Setting Up excel

Once you have exported the data to excel, you can keep which ever columns you like, however in this instance I have kept:

• Keyword
• User defined value
• Visits
• Ecommerce Conversion rate
• Count (I Simply added =SUM(1) into another column)

Now remember the data I have is from 1.5 days worth of traffic, so firstly we are going to see how many keyword visits were on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th ,5th and above pages.

Use the following code in excel to search the “User defined value” for the page listings. Remember the following meanings:

• (page: 0) = Page 1
• (page: 10) = Page 2
• (page: 20) = Page 3
• Etc..

The Excel Formula:


=COUNTIFS($B2:$B506, "*(page: 0*")
=COUNTIFS($B2:$B506, "*(page: 10*")
=COUNTIFS($B2:$B506, "*(page: 20*")
Etc..


This will simply count the column for cells that contain the information between “* *”.

The Results

Listings	No.
1st page	426
2nd page	17
3rd page	10
4th page	5
5th page	1
Other	46

The Trick now is to look at where your receiving traffic from keywords which are ranked on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th pages and then correlate this information with the Google Adwords keywords tool for predicting traffic, you may find some quick wins, that you can easily push up the rankings.

Reporting
You can also look at your overall performance each month, when I have that data, I’ll give you an update. But you will probably agree these are definitely the profiles you should setup as standard within Google analytics.