Comments on: Clean Rankings Report in Google Analytics

By: Damon

Damon — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:52:47 +0000

Sorry for taking so long to respond, I haven’t been using the ranking report and just haven’t gotten around to checking it out.

Google has been experimenting a lot with different query strings lately, it seems that 90% of Google searches don’t include ranking information anymore.

There was some rumbling a few months back about GA adding ranking info by default, so it might not be a problem for long, but at the moment there is no way to track Google ranking with GA for most searches.

By: DVogel

DVogel — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:15:10 +0000

Damon, thank you for covering this topic so fully; your level of detail and ongoing additions and improvement to your code is very helpful and appreciated.

Thanks to your detailed instructions, I was able to setup the filters. However, most likely to an error on my part, I’m experiencing a couple problems I assume to be connected. Since you can’t see my code, I’m just going to describe the symptoms, in case they tell you where I probably went wrong:

1) As James described above, about 90% of the User Defined visits have a value of (not set)
2) All of the keywords that are correctly tracked are from page 2 or deeper (I have filters setup through page 10).

To me, it looks like the (not set) probably include all my missing page 1 results. So, I’ve triple checked my Page 1 filter code, and it appears the same as your instructions.

Is there anything you would recommend I look at or change based on these symptoms?

Thank you for your time and effort!

By: James

James — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:02:29 +0000

Hi Damon,

I don’t have any exclude filters applied, just an ‘include’ for organic traffic.

The ratio of (not set) results is about 90%.

Thanks

By: Damon

Damon — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 05:30:36 +0000

@James

You probably have a problem with the filters that exclude non-organic traffic or traffic that doesn’t come from google, yahoo, live or msn.

Check the detailed instructions for these steps when trouble-shooting.

By: James

James — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:10:34 +0000

Hi,

Great filters, although I still seem to be getting a lot of results listed as (not set), any ideas how to fix this?

Thanks

By: Web Site Success Metrics – Not Just Google Rankings « HUE Designer

Web Site Success Metrics – Not Just Google Rankings « HUE Designer — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:11:45 +0000

[...] Anyways, check on how to apply these filters here – Search Ranking Filters [...]

By: How to track keywords, rankings and landing pages in Google Analytics | Leo Fogarty .com

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:38:40 +0000

[...] 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, [...]

By: admin

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:11:54 +0000

Yes.

What you’re really seeing is the number for the first result that that particular page. Their query string just says start showing results at result number (10 or 11). Google starts counting at 0 while Yahoo and MSN start at 1 which is why sometimes page 2 is 10 and sometimes it is 11.

By: Bernardo

Bernardo — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:49:35 +0000

Thank you for your reply. Should I consider ‘page: 0′ and ‘page: 1′ as the same? If so, any tip on how to fix that?

By: Damon

Damon — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:39:59 +0000

Bernardo,

The reason you are getting that is that you haven’t implemented the filters past page 5.

Whenever you see something like that just drop the 0 (or 1) and then add 1. So your example is from page 8.