A few people have asked me about viewing Google, Yahoo, and MSN separately in the Google Analytics search ranking report.
At first I recommended creating 3 separate profiles, 1 each for Google, Yahoo, and MSN. But using the Google Analytics custom segments makes a lot more sense because it’s easier to switch between the 3 when viewing the SERP report and it’s easier to set up.
Segmenting the Search Ranking Report
- In the Organic Search Ranking report, in the Settings section of the left menu, select Advanced Segments.
- In the Manage Advanced Segments page, select Create new custom segment at the top right of the screen.
- From the list of Dimensions on the left, open the Traffic Sources dimensions and drag Source to the dimension or metric box.
- From the Condition box, select Matches regular expression. Matches regular expression is better than Matches exactly because Matches regular expression lets you enter case insensitive Values.
- In Value enter google or yahoo. For MSN create two statements using Add “or” statement one matching msn, the other matching live. I’m surprised you have to do this, but it seems the pipe (|) character doesn’t work in the custom segment regular expressions. Maybe it’s because the custom segments already have an or function built in.
MSN Settings
- In the Name segment box, give your segment a name. Google Traffic seems appropriate.
- Repeat for Yahoo and MSN.
Viewing the Segments
- Open your User Defined report.
- In the Advanced Segments box at the top right of the page, click to open the Advanced Segments dialog.
Open Advanced Segments
- In the Custom Segments area, select your Google, Yahoo, and MSN segments and click Apply.
Select Custom Segments
Your organic traffic will be graphed by search engine and your keywords will be segmented by search engine.
Unfortunately, keywords on different pages will appear multiple times in the report. Anyone got any experience writing Greasemonkey scripts so we can see keywords grouped together with the pages showing after each search engine?
Enjoy.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Absolutely fantastic. Amazing work. Thank you.
I have applied the segmentation and it’s working fine.
In Value when we enter google, its possible that someone may come to our site through country specific google (.co.uk,.au,.in)
so should we write google.com or just google.
Entering google will match all Google domains.
Entering google.com will exclude country-specific domains.
Do whichever you think will be most useful.
If you talk about Google’s tools for keywords then i would disagree. i am using the other tools of google as well. I have opted to use SERP analytics tool as finding keywords are not as broad as in Google. The link is – http://www.serpanalytics.com/tools/top_keywords
Thanks for the post anyways!
‘white horse likes red apples’
{ 1 trackback }