I'm having some trouble with GA reports for one of my sites. Since the beginning of the month, GA is reporting URLs instead of keywords under Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic, in the "keyword" column.
What can be causing this, and how can I fix it?
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Additional info:
Have not set up custom filters in this account.
I get mixed keywords and URLs in the same "keyword" column.
Having the same issue I scrutinized my server logs to get to the bottom of this. It seems that most organic searches with the domain as keyword do originate from google maps (and other google services) - when people click the link in the marker on maps the url is transmitted as the search term.
You need to select "Keyword" for the primary dimension. You've likely selected "Landing Page".
What you are observing is a normally possible scenario. In organic search report, under keywords column, GA will list the search keywords which showed your sites in the search engine result and subsequently led to an incoming traffic.
Let the website which your tracking using analytics be http://www.abc.com . Now assume someone searches , say in google, by giving a full url like http://www.xyz.com instead of just a word like xyz and your site link shows up among the search results. Now if this person clicks on your site link in the search results, then google analytics will log this with a traffic source as search>organic and keyword http://www.xyz.com , as used for the search. Now if the person searches using the keywords http://www.xyz.com + someword and your site appears in the search result and the person clicks on it , then in analytics you will see the keyword as http://www.xyz.com + someword which will be combination of url + word. This happens mostly if your site abc.com has some page which links to xyz.com or provides the full link and so your site is also indexed by search engines for searches with that web url.
Related
We've been experiencing this problem with Google Analytics and our URL ad tracking query strings for about a year and a half now, spanning approximately 40 different URLs and query strings which all did this.
When we look up the pages in Google Analytics, a couple of problems are occurring:
The URL is split up and tracking as 2 different pages and the
analytics are split between them. (more on this in the example and
screenshot)
The new (2nd) page that is created within the analytics, has the ad
tracking query and the last item of the URL deleted and replaced with
the word "none".
If the URL ends with a word, it removes the word and
the tracking query.
If the URL ends with "index", it removes "index"
and the tracking query.
If the URL ends with a "/", it removes the /
and the tracking query.
and replaces them with "none"
Example:
This is the original URL and tracking query:
/ucm/lp/FY18/search/cas/index?from=UG-F18-Search
In Google analytics it gets divided into 2 pages:
/ucm/lp/FY18/search/cas/index?from=UG-F18-Search
and the new /ucm/lp/FY18/search/cas/none.
(Note how the query and the word "index" are removed and replaced with "none".)
The way the analytics get split up between the pages is interesting:
On the first URL, (the real page), the average time on page is 00:00:04, and for the second URL it's 00:01:03.
Entrances on the first = 7,888. Entrances on the second = 147
Exits on first = 26.43%. Exits on second = 87.15%
Seemingly what's happening is the user will land on the original page, /ucm/lp/FY18/search/cas/index?from=UG-F18-Search, and it starts to record the analytics, but, then something happens and it loads /ucm/lp/FY18/search/cas/none where the analytics will finish recording.
In addition, our 404 page gets a hit during this process too because /ucm/lp/FY18/search/cas/none isn't actually a real page. I don't have proof of the 404 issue right now, but that's what I'm told. I thought it was worth mentioning just it case it helps, but take it for what it is.
From our testing, we're pretty confident that the user has a seamless experience, and this is fully a "just-in-the-analytics" problem. The main reason this is a problem for us is because we can't accurately, or easily, tell which of our ads and venders are performing the best.
Please let me know if I can explain this better or provide more examples or screenshots. Thank you!
GA is splitting' the page because you're sending it 2 hits:
You can easily verify it in the Network tab of Chrome developer tools or by using the Tag Assistant browser extension.
I'd try commenting out the two remarketing tags and check the tracking, or migrating all these tags to Google Tag Manager.
Developed the multiple region shopping website, Now creating the goals in google analytic for successful purchase of product,But the question is how we can add the funnel steps in mutiple region site.
like /us/shop and uk/shop that proceed towads the thankyou page of the site which is added as the goal tracking url.
You have to use regex to select the correct page name, this also needs to be applied to the destination page.
Take in consideration that the match type selected on the Goal is applied to the filter:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1116091?hl=en#matchTypes
There are three diferent match types that define how Analytics identifies a URL for either a goal or a funnel. The match type that you select for your goal URL also applies to the URLs in the funnel, if you create one.
So here is a screenshot of a proposal configuration
Test the regex and see if this match with you actual page configuration
We have site search set up on our site, with the correct query parameter, however, we are not seeing site search data. See the image here for how our config is set up.
The URL for our search page looks like this https://www.premierinc.com/?s=Example.
We know there has been search traffic. Internal users (myself included) have performed a number of searches. The tag has been live for over a week, so processing delay shouldn't be an issue.
I've also triple checked that I'm on the correct view in GA.
Any ideas?
So it turns out that GA favors the document path (dp) parameter over the document location (dl) parameter. So although the search term was in the payload sent to GA, it was promptly ignored when it got there :)
Moral, if you use dp, you probably need to use dq as well.
(Thanks to Kim Towne on the GA forums for helping me figure this one out).
I need to be able to track whether particular inbound links from an external site result in individual sales - is that possible with Google Analytics?
Goto Traffic Sources -> Sources-> Referals. Klick on the domain name to drill down to the url level. On the top of the page hit the "Ecommerce" Tab. This will give you the number of sales for that link, but not indivdual transactions.
If you need to get down to indivdual transactions your best bet is to ask the external site to add campaign parameters to the link (see here : http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867), build a custom segement based on the campaign name and apply this to the conversions->transactions display.
On second thought, you might be able to build a segment based on the referal path (so no need for campaign parameters), but I haven't tested this. Worth a try, though.
In my app, there's a requirement to track search queries, which individuals to the app. The point here is to track specifically individuals/search_queries, i.e. I want to be able to say:
User 10.20.30.40 (IP is derived from client, ok) came to my website
from Google's search results page of 'hello world' query
Is that even possible?
I investigated the problem a bit. It turned out, that when the user on Google Search result page clicks a link and gets to the underlying page, the referer doesn't contain the search query. Say, for example, I entered a "Hello world" query...
I open google and enter a "Hello world" query;
I see a serach result page with a link to wikipedia on top; I follow it
I enter "document.referrer" in consonle to see:
http://www.google.com.ua/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CGkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fru.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FHello%2C_world!&ei=HZ0fUIXTIordtAau54GwAQ&usg=AFQjCNHSAHv8NwVNdaxMvh0OhIxs6Zb1rQ&sig2=a8tEGTBNcFWOPykloXj_Xg
There's a &q= param with a blank value, preventing me to figure out the query the user entered.
I believe Google internally uses some of the query params (i.e. ved, ei, usg or sig2) from the URL above to keep track of query used to get to the site, and thus gatehr the statistics about which queries are used mostly to the get to the website. I couldn't find any information regarding how to use them.
In the meantime, Google Analytics would only gather a general statistics, not for individuals. Yet I noticed that there's an ability to use Custom Variables. Is it possible to use them somehow in order to track query the user came with? If so, wouldn't it be a violation of Google Analytics Terms Of Service?
So again: is there a way to know a search query one came to the site with?
This is not possible. Google erases the value of q parameter, so instead of
`?q=search+query`
one always observs.
`?q=`
Though, Google provides another way (the so called convinient one) to know which queries were used to come to your website: Google Analytics.
Also, it's impossible to track user_ip/search_query pair due to Google Analytics ToS.