You might need to read that bit twice because it’s a lot to take in.

The net effect of this is that Google Analytics and all the other web traffic & analytics tools are going to get some very big holes in their data. Of course Google AdWords click data will still be fully available – they are just blocking the organic click data.

What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query. They can also receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools. This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic. If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.

A full summary of this decision is here but there are a few key points to note.

Firstly this is only for google.com at the moment and only for logged in users so there is no need to panic just yet. However we saw with the Panda update how Google starts off with Google.com and then rolls things out worldwide and increases the number of affected people every few weeks.

Secondly we have seen the growth of Google+ and Gmail is already huge so there is no reason to assume that the number of users this affects will be small. I can see a very large percentage of people being logged in to Google at all times. Why wouldn’t they be?

Thirdly there is no reason at all that Google wouldn’t migrate everybody to SSL in the future whether they are logged in or not.

To me this seems like a move designed both to make Google appear to be protecting users as well as an opportunity for them to take away data that helps big sites build more effective SEO campaigns.

There isn’t much point worrying about this because there is nothing that anybody can do about it. The SEO industry has lots of challenges to deal with and losing what may turn out to be a small percentage of data won’t make a material difference to campaigns at this stage.

If Google turns off keyword data altogether then that’s another matter.

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Google turns off keyword referrer information for logged in users

Analytics by default is based on the “last click” so if a user searched for a keyword such as “sofas” and clicked on an organic SEO result one week and then the next week visited your site via a PPC brand keyword then that would be attributed to a PPC visit.

The new Funnels allow you to attribute any visits of this nature and report on them as SEO assists.

We’ve run this analysis across all our clients large & small and the numbers average out to 30% – this is the additional revenue on top of the amount reported in Google Analytics that our clients are making from SEO on average.

How to run this analysis

Running this analysis isn’t particularly easy. First of all you need to be in the new version of GA and then you need to set up some filters.

Remember that we want to find conversions that would not be reported as “non-brand organic” under the normal Analytics system so first we need to ensure that we are including non-brand organic search from the assisted conversions but excluding it from last interaction conversions.

Here are the filters you need:

Include Last Interaction from: Keyword containing [BRAND NAME]
OR
Exclude Last interaction from: Source/Medium containing google / organic
AND
Exclude Assist Interaction from: Keyword containing [BRAND NAME]
AND
Include Assist Interaction from: Source / Medium containing google / organic
THE OR/AND FUNCTIONS MUST BE DONE THE WAY I SAY OR THIS WON’T WORK.

It is also be useful to have a Last Click Conversions segment. This way we can find out what Google normally attributes to Non-Brand SEO. This is easier.
Exclude Last Interaction from: Keyword containing [BRAND NAME]
AND
Include Last Interaction from: Source / Medium containing google / organic

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Google Analytics Multi Channel Funnels show SEO drives 30% more revenue

The change means that the traffic is reported as Google Organic rather than as referral traffic like it used to be. This means that you are likely to see a chart like the one below.

It’s not yet clear whether this is a change in Google Analytics or whether the new Google Images design is sending traffic in a different way. If it’s the latter then other analytics systems might show the same change in figures.

This will certainly cause some increases in the perceived success of SEO campaigns around the UK over the next few weeks!

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Google Analytics changes how image search is reported

For most sites you can produce this report by looking at the top Google Organic landing pages and filtering by an appropriate folder or file name from the URL.

The problem is that a lot of sites don’t have a difference URL structure for each section so the above method of gathering data won’t work. Certainly if you have an ecommerce site you can’t separate products by category unless you have the category in your URL and that’s usually a bad idea for SEO.

What we’ve been doing is to use Google Analytics Custom Variables, applied at the page level, to tell Google what type of page the user has landed on.

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',
1, // This custom var is set to slot #1. Required parameter.
'Section', // The top-level name for your online content categories. Required parameter.
'Life & Style', // Sets the value of "Section" to "Life & Style" for this particular aricle. Required parameter.
3 // Sets the scope to page-level. Optional parameter.
]);

This sounds quite simple to set up and it’s actually the main example Google gives about using the page level variables but the real problem is getting the data for your Custom Variables out of Google Analytics. It took a lot of work to figure out how to do this because every report we tried was just returning the overall visits to a page during the session rather than specifically for landing pages.

After much testing the report below is what we came up with. You need to set up a new Custom Report with the following metrics & dimensions. The addition of Entrances & Visits together is just a check – they should return the same number. Hope this is of use to anybody else trying to do this.

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Using Page Level Google Analytics Custom Variables to report on SEO traffic by page type

The way Google Analytics tracks AdWords clicks is via the gclid parameter which is added to your landing page URL when you enable auto-tagging in AdWords.

If you don’t enable auto-tagging (and haven’t set up manual tagging) then your visitors will be miscounted as organic rather than paid and the number of AdWords “visits” being reported by Analytics will be a lot less than the number of “clicks”.

One of the major problems with the gclid parameter is that it’s stripped out of URLs quite often when 301 redirects are applied, so if you change your URL structure without altering your landing page URLs in AdWords then your traffic will be miscounted, unless you have built special 301 redirects which preserve the gclid parameter.

The way to track this is simple. Just load up Google Analytics and click on Traffic Sources > Adwords > Keywords and then the “Clicks” tab.

This should give you a report something like the one below. If tracking is correct you will see the “clicks” figure is slightly higher than the “visits” figure. A 5% tolerance is average here, anything higher than this and you might want to investigate further. The figure for visits will always be lower as a percentage of people click the ad and either leave before your Analytics has time to track them or have JavaScript disabled. The “clicks” figure is pulled from AdWords directly so is always quite accurate.

As you can see in the screenshot above, around 16,000 AdWords clicks are missing from the “visits” number which means they are misclassified as Google Organic.

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How to check your AdWords traffic isn’t being reported as organic

I’m just back from 2 weeks holiday so my involvement in fixing this was pretty much zero however it was a tough hack to track down and it took a few days to get the issue resolved.

As you can see from the chart below Google Organic traffic went from the average 1300/day mark down to around 10 visits per day. Pretty bad news when it happened for 5 days in a row.

Getting malware is a nightmare, I have no idea how the average person without a team of developers would be able to fix things. We still don’t know what happened however it seems that the prototype.js file was the one modified.

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Impact of malware on Google traffic

Now back to the point of this post – to tell you all about a product we have been testing on some of our business to business clients sites. Anybody who has done B2B SEO will know that it’s a different ball game due to many factors:

• Not much traffic to go around
• You compete with consumer facing brands
• A lot of your visitors are sometimes not your target customers
• Products & services are normally more expensive so conversion rates are lower
• Every lead is worth a lot of money

With this in mind we have been trialling a product called Web Forensics which uses 9 databases of IP addresses to identify the businesses that are browsing your website and not filling in your contact form. Once you have this information you can call them up and turn them into leads – even one client a year will probably pay for this software many times over. You have to see this in action to believe how useful it is.

The software is a paid solution with rates depending on visitor numbers but we have negotiated a free trial for Blogstorm readers so you can see the software in action on your own website with no obligation whatsoever.

Here is the important bit – to get the free trial you need to email them via a special address which is freetrial@webforensics.co.uk – don’t contact them via the site otherwise you won’t get the full treatment.

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Business to business SEO tool Web Forensics lets you see visitors who didn’t convert

This month Google is finally going to add a report to Analytics which shows the exact search keywords for AdWords campaigns in your reports, previously this was only available via AdWords (great if you have access, not so great otherwise) and by a filter which was quite hard to implement.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs.

You can see a video of the new reports below:

Interestingly the asynchronous tracking tag is now out of beta and will be the default option for new users.

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AdWords exact search keywords coming to Analytics in May

Luckily there is an easy way to show the amounts, if you are at home using custom reports. Simply set up the report using the dimensions below and the information will be available straight away.

The screenshot below shows the final report.

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How to view actual goal numbers rather than percentages in Google Analytics

An easy method to identify pages that are causing your visitors to leave is to order your Google Analytics content report by “% Exit” but this doesn’t really help because you get loads of pages with 2 visitors and one left straight away giving a 50% Exit Rate.

What we do is to add a filter to only include pages with more than 50 page views which results in a nice list of your worst performing pages. The next step is to identify the problems with them which we will address in another post.

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How to identify your sites worst pages