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Category: Reporting & Analytics

Discuss the best ways to report on performance and communicate results to stakeholders.


  • I help run an ecommerce business that mainly runs on Google organic search (yes, I realize this is not a good place to be). Last April, we saw around 25-30% of our organic search cut. I’m pretty sure it was due to the mobile update but we had some changes in the past month or two before that. I’m looking for someone to review my analytics account and see what happened. Possibly this is called an audit? Also, we’re looking to ask some questions about long term strategy as we are thinking about a redesign and switching to a new platform. Maybe more content? Maybe more social?

    | kirbyf
    0

  • Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with... I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help? Any input greatly appreciated 🙂

    | Gokart
    0

  • Hi, does anyone know or have a link for me, where I can find, what or how a Bounce is defined for mobile devices? If you are on safari mobile and click on the homebutton, is that a bounce?
    If you are surfing and you get a message alert on the top and you change application, is that a bounce? Any ideas are much appreciated. Thanks

    | ennovators
    1

  • One of my smaller clients noticed a huge jump in direct traffic visits last month.  The bounce rate was around 97% so I'm pretty certain that most of the traffic was illegitimate.  I know how to filter out spam referrals and organic keywords in Google Analytics.  However I'm not sure what to do about direct traffic spam.  Are there recommendations for filtering this out?  Can I identify spam IP addresses?

    | RosemaryB
    0

  • Hi guys, I'm trying to find missing Google Analytics code on pages using Screaming Frog. I usually use Screaming Frog to find pages missing GA tracking but sometimes i encounter websites like: http://tinyurl.com/qjbdyxr which don't contain the GA code in the html (even though there is a GA code on the page). I'm guessing its located somewhere else and pulled in from somewhere? Any suggestions? Cheers,
    Chris

    | jayoliverwright
    0

  • Hi guys.  Having issues with analytics. Firstly, it doesn't record all our sales accurately.   My boss downloaded a sales report directly from our site, and it doesn't match up to the analytics, our actual sales were significantly higher than Google analytics was reporting (by about a 1/3).   Any idea why Google is missing so many of the conversions? Also, I'm trying to work our how many assisted conversion we are getting from our ad words campaigns.  I've been looking through our top conversion path data to try find conversions that started with a paid click. However, I seem to have some inconsistencies.  We have only one ad words group that is on the display network (Re-marketing V1 Ad group 1) , and according to analytics we have a conversion from it (See Screen shot 1).  However, there is no record of this in our ad words data. (See screen shot 2). This is over the same time period. I don't know what to take from this.  Can anyone help? Isaac. Screen%20shot%201.png Screen%20shot%202.png

    | isaac663
    0

  • I was wondering in hope of not duplicating URLs, if you include video in a video sitemap should it also be in your global xml sitemap. Would it be better to put them in one or both?

    | mattdinbrooklyn
    0

  • My website have company and events profile from 200 countries. So it does have lots of URL. Earlier in August 2014, Google used to crawl 90% of URLs we submit. Thing goes wrong when we shifted from http to https. We lost traffic. But we are gaining it slowly. Main concern is that, It still does not indexed all submitted URLs. It have crawled merely 8% of all URLs submitted. site address is businessvibes.com Any help would be appreciated.

    | irteam
    0

  • I am tracking my domain e.g www.xyz.com to an existing google analytics account . I want to track www.xyz.com/blog separately in the google analytics account. How can I do that?

    | Windlass
    0

  • Wondering if anyone has experienced 0 data in their Google Search Console (Search Analytics) and found possible solutions to retrieve data? We have a few clients who, prior to the update to Google Search Console, were getting data regularly in terms of the Search Queries report, but ever since the update to Google Search Console, they are no longer receiving data. As an FYI, both the www and non-www versions of the website are verified in Search Console and the XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt files are clean, tested and working fine. Any insights or experience of sites showing 0 data in Search Analytics? Any possible solutions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | SEO5Team
    0

  • Hi, Bit of an unusual one this, so please bear with me. This site http://www.hayesandhurst.com/ is being tracked in Google Analytics but we're unsure as to how. To the best of our knowledge we haven't inserted the tracking ID into the theme options or the tracking code into the source - and yet it appears to be tracking successfully! I did send some instructions to the client to set up the Analytics account in their name - I fear they have added the code somewhere to the site, but we cannot see where! Perhaps via Google tag Manager?? As I say, an odd one this, but if anyone can shed any light on this mystery i'd be hugely grateful. The tracking ID is UA-64505394-1 for the record. Regards,
    Nathan

    | nathangdavidson
    0

  • Hi guys, I need some help on the following: My client has different websites worldwide all with country extensions and on overall .com domain. These websites (and GTM accounts) are all managed by local agencies. We would like to implement a cross domain tracking GA account in order to see some overall trends and numbers. We don't want to implement our codes in the existing containers as they are in many cases managed by local agencies. Is it really negative to implement two GTM containers on one website? Any other ideas? Thanks,
    Sander

    | WeAreDigital_BE
    0

  • Hi, My Ave. session duration has dropped from 2:10 to 0:14 overnight. At the same time, amount of sessions from all channels grew on average of 56%. This increased (and I guess low quality) traffic is coming in from multiple regions, languages, devices and channels. I was not able to pin point it to 1 source, location, landing page etc. See enclosed screen shot. I would appreciate if anyone can shed some light on what's wrong and if there are any SEO implications. Thanks. pxWQX2E.png

    | Amis
    0

  • Hi All,
    I have two dates with two different numbers I want to calculate the "% Change" like google analytics, The numbers of June 2015 - 127,931 sessions
    The numbers of June 2014 - 90914 sessions please tell me what is the %Change. Best. J

    | JohnPalmer
    0

  • Hi guys, Two days ago our Google Analytics Event tracker began to show this Event/Label, etc. I cannot find its source. Anybody knows what is this about? Thanks for your answers. Ana

    | anagentile
    1

  • In a year went from around 300k indexed pages to around >100k according to GWT.  Could this be duplicate content issue, lost links, spam, aged links or all of the above? either way an audit is in order. Thanks! Chris

    | Sundance_Kidd
    0

  • Could someone explain how the following metrics in Google Analytics are being calculated: Search Engine Optimization (Acquisition): clicks on a certain query Campaigns (Acquisition): sessions on a certain keyword GA Help states that both 'queries' and 'organic keywords' refer to the actual string a user enters in Google Search. In that cases it seems that 'clicks' on a SERP result through a given query and 'sessions' through that very same query could not be miles apart. E.g.: Clicks through query X = 170 Sessions through organic keyword X = 8 Thank you for helping me out!

    | WeAreDigital_BE
    0

  • Hi Guys, I am setting up tracking for a couple of offline campaigns in Analytics and would just like to know if this will cause issues. The situation is below: Two URLs Ranking Well Organically: www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-b URLs Setup for the Purpose of Offline Campaigns www.domain.co.uk/campaign1 www.domain.co.uk/campaign2 Plan to Track this in Analytics www.domain.co.uk/campaign1 redirecting to www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a_&utm_medium=qr&utm_source=test1&utm_campaign=test1_ www.domain.co.uk/campaign2 redirecting to www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a&utm_medium=qr&utm_source=test2&utm_campaign=test1__ So the idea is that the user gets a nice simple URL to input from the off-line media (www.domain.co.uk/campaign1). This then redirects to one of the pages thats performing well organically (www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a) but with the relevant tracking (www.domain.co.uk/campaign1 redirecting to www.domain.co.uk/area-covered/area-a&utm_medium=qr&utm_source=test1&utm_campaign=test1). The only way that the tracking URL can be accessed by the user is if the off-line media URL is entered. My main concern here is how Google will treat this. Obviously I don't want to cause issues with the two URLs that are ranking well organically. Would having a version of exactly the same URL, just with tracking do so? Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance.

    | CarlWint
    0

  • Hi all, Our site is build on Wordpress and formerly the post URL's had the typical date format at the beginning. This made it easy for me to look at, for example, all search traffic to the blog. I would just view URL's containing /2014/ and /2015/ and boom. We have since removed the dates from the URL's with proper redirects etc, which is great, but now I can't figure out a way to look at ONLY the blog in GA. I like to track a KPI of 'search visits to blog posts' and I can't figure out how to now. Can I set up a GA event that only fires when the post type template for blog posts loads? Some other solution? I'm lost here, and there's gotta be a good way to do it...

    | 3DR
    0

  • we recently replatformed our main site and switched to https.  For the first 2-3 weeks after we moved organic traffic was great, we did not lose any ( increased a little), but then it dropped off significantly.  Attached is a screenshot from one of our main keywords that dropped off. You can see click (blue) and impressions (red) dropped off, and the position became unstable, but in the last week it has stabilised to about the same position it was before, but the clicking and impressions are still very low. The keyword is generic (for our industry) and there would not be any major seasonal changes in the search volume. I  can't  make sense of this data, could be be wrong? Kd3p5f9.jpg

    | PaddyDisplays
    1

  • Is there a tracking code for them? I cannot find a way to get them to track my site data. I know it seems trivial, but it is sadly a big tool in my industry so I need to get my data on their site

    | Atomicx
    0

  • Hi all, a few of my sites are suffering from referral spam. I read a couple of articles here on how to exclude them from your traffic using htaccess but today I was going through some referral stats of the company I work for and I noticed a lot of referral traffic coming from prod2.ssosecure.com I didn't find any article telling me this is spam, so it could also be an intranet of one of our clients where they are sending their employees to our application. Anybody a clue what this could be?

    | jorisbrabants
    0

  • I'm looking to find a certain type of link on my site. A link that we're directing out of the site. We have a lot of subdomains though and I was wondering if there was a way to find all the links on each subdomain without screaming frog them all?

    | mattdinbrooklyn
    0

  • I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here. I've been trying to block spam from my client's analytics for over a month and I just can't seem to get it right. I am beyond frustrated. Here is a list of the filters I have: http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#0 And here is referral traffic from them regardless: http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#1 Specifically this is what the filter looks like. Am I doing something wrong here? http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#2 I have also put a filter in place to block traffic from Russia, and it doesn't seem to be working 100% either. http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#3 On top of that, it seems anytime I do manage to block something, another site just pops up in its place. Is it endless? My clients are very small local business and this is absolutely ruining their analytics. I can't even show them their traffic reports since it's absolutely meaningless with all this spam. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    | everestagency
    0

  • Hi there, a few months ago we had a new site launch. As we operate internationally, visitors in different countries do get redirected to the specific country subfolder. e.x. domain.com/it Since site launch. Direct Traffic is performing really really well(almost to good to be true) while organic is doing decent but not more. I'm quite sure, that a part of direct belongs to the organic channel. Though now I need strong arguments to fight against our own web development team. Do you have any suggestions, where and how I can find strong evidence of my hypotheses? Thanks in advance

    | ennovators
    0

  • I just found a Google search results page showing a URL with a UTM source tag attached. Any idea how or why this has happened? How can I stop it as I'm guessing this is overwriting my organic visits with referrals from this site. See attached photo for pic of SERP page. The link is going here: http://employment.govt.nz/er/holidaysandleave/parentalleave/?utm_source=newzealandnow.govt.nz 5vxTDTi.png

    | DanielleNZ
    0

  • I'm on the case to diagnose an unnaturally low bounce rate, as in under 2%. Yes, the site has two Universal analytics tags, but Google says that would not compromise data (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032400?hl=en). So I am trying to figure out how to look at event tracking to see if there is a configuration error.  But, I am not a developer so am unsure how to review and would welcome the help of the Moz community. The site is http://corsa.com if you wish to take a peek. Thanks!

    | butler_emily
    0

  • I'm wondering why my average mobile position is much better than my average desktop position. I'm wondering if Google is comparing the same queries for both mobile vs desktop or if they're only showing me the top ranked for each type of search. Is it example 1 or 2? Example 1: Desktop may have 5,000 ranking queries that average to 21.6
                      Mobile may have 1,500 ranking queries that average to 8.5 OR Example 2: example.com has 5,000 total ranking keywords, those queries' average ranking in a desktop search 21.6 and mobile search 8.5. I'm curious to know exactly what I'm seeing in Google's Search Console. https://08875344305734164866.googlegroups.com/attach/777ae98664ed418f/Mobile%20VS%20Desktop.png?part=0.1&view=1&vt=ANaJVrEHOjRLlPH43i00NnC8PxaG3ct7bsHum_TWnUoa7xVamCpRp8jrvRQJL-gz4n7Q0otqKcKxcAJA5z1VySs2naQU_Zy5tDps6bJhUSZsLRQq4uU-tJQ

    | Pauly_Gigs
    0

  • Viewing this report **Behaviour > Site content > All pages **with primary dimensions of **Page ** and **Page title **are showing different results for one specific page on our site. We noticed a huge spike in pageviews and entrances to that specific page on our site. The user flow report shows traffic going through and from the page (in high volume) from other pages on the site which suggests that it's not the usual case of spam referrals. When I view the report above by page, I get unrealistic data. Over 600% increase in pageviews and over 900% increase in entrances. When I view by page title however, I get realistic results. Can anyone help shed some light on why these two reports will be different? Anyone else seeing similar issues?

    | OptiBacUK
    0

  • Hi, Our eCommerce site currently includes a blog section known as Igloo which we have filled with unique and helpful content that is useful to a fair few people, not just customers of ours. It currently attracts a large number of visitors (more than the actual eCommerce side of the site in actual fact) organically who aren't currently customers of ours. Very few of these turn in to paying clients so it's not really a money spinner but it has worked quite well from a linkbait perspective / traffic generation perspective and undoubtedly a few of these people do end up making a purchase on the actual shopping end of our site. We're look at ways to encourage these people finding help on this free resource to take a look at our homepage and hopefully make an order but in the meantime I am worried that there may be a few downsides to us creating this content: Google may see us more as a help site than a shopping site. Since selling products is where we make our money this could ultimately be a bad thing. Our bounce rate is REALLY high (I'm talking around 94%) on the help site versus around 20% on the eCommerce site. I guess people land on the article they want, read it and then disappear. Would this bounce rate skew our entire site stats and ultimately result in decreased performance in the SERPS. I would appreciate your opinions and, in the event you do feel it may be hurting us overall perhaps some suggestions on how to mitigate the effects? Many thanks!

    | ChrisHolgate
    0

  • Hi all, our website Creately is listed in the Chrome Web Store. Its not an extension or an app, but just a link to app which users can use to quickly log into the app and start drawing their diagrams. They do provide you a way to add Google Analytics to track some visitor data like user visits. But we want to figure out from which sections of Chrome Web Store is sending us traffic. When looking at the Source/Medium reports I can see the following. chrome-ntp-icon / (not set) chrome-app-launcher / (not set) chrome-ntp-launcher / (not set) chrome-app-launcher-search / (not set) chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog / (not set) I'm guessing these indicate where we're getting the traffic to the Chrome web store page but I can't seem to find any information about what they mean. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

    | Nishadha
    0

  • I have noticed that when I run a landing page report and use the advanced option so I can view only the landing pages that include a particular string in the URL, have noticed that I in the report, the graph at the top will say one thing, but the data below says something else.  For example, the graph for one particular search shows 200 Impressions, but the info below says 700 impressions and 610 clicks. Anyone seen anything similar or have any ideas why? Thanks! Craig

    | TheCraig
    0

  • I have been trying to submit my sitemap to Bing [via their webmaster tools] for well over a week and it continues to report 'pending' My site is HTTPS and the sitemap is accepted by Google. I questioned Bing about this and got this response: To set your expectations, our Sitemap fetchers use a different pipeline and because of this, we cannot crawl Sitemaps in HTTPS format. We require that you submit an HTTP version of sitemap in order for Bing to properly crawl the file. Please go ahead and delete the current Sitemap and resubmit a new one in HTTP. Currently I don't and can't have a HTTP version of my site & sitemap and my developers are telling me that 3hrs worth of dev time will go into coming up with a work-around which I'm not sure I want to invest in [I have more important things to concentrate my spend on!]. Has anyone been faced with this problem and is there any quick/cheap alternative or do I just accept that Bing won't crawl my site until they update their end?!

    | cityxplora.com
    0

  • Hello Guys, I am using google tagmanager and i have configured adwords in tag manager now what i find is that this link - www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion_async.js showing on my homepage not in view source but when i do inspect element at that time it appears. So do you think after using google tag manager still i need to use the given link? Thanks, Raghu

    | raghuvinder
    0

  • In GA i have seen a huge spike in traffic from foreign countries like japan, china, brazil, germany. the bounce rates are almost all 100%. any ideas why this is occurring?

    | dhanson24
    0

  • Hello Expert, I am using google tag manager and google analytic is already configured in that now i just want to confirm when i do inspect element of my home page in that i can see this link - http://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js where as if i do view source of my page then it is not visible. so what is this link - www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js  and what role it play? Do we really need this link to be present on website? Regards, Raghuvinder

    | raghuvinder
    0

  • Hi, I've noticed that the Queries report in analytics gives a completely different answer (for impressions, clicks, CTR, Avg. position) to webmaster tools. What gives? Which would you use? Thanks, Amelia

    | CommT
    0

  • Greetings all! Does anyone know if there is a more recent, but comparable, book that covers the topic of analytics like Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity or Brian Clifton's Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, 2nd Edition? These were published in 2009 & 2010. I know the core concepts remain the same, but the technology has improved greatly.

    | AfroSEO
    0

  • Hi, I asked a couple of weeks ago for some help with interview questions... I've now written these, but I have been asked to come up with some data with an anomaly for the interviewee to identify and explain what they'd do... I'm thinking something to do with landing pages, but what?! Any help would be most appreciated 🙂 Thanks again! Amelia

    | CommT
    1

  • In the past, when we've setup a filter to exclude a single IP address, we just entered the IP address normally. For example, 64.68.82.164. However, I was researching how to exclude a range of IP addresses and found out that I might be using the wrong format to filter a single IP address. Is it supposed to be 64.68.82.164 or 64.68.82.164? Will it still work if it was entered without the escape characters? Thanks in advance Moz community for your assistance!

    | peteboyd
    0

  • We're looking to install a plugin for our Wordpress blog, to be able to receive analytical data right in our wordpress dashboard. Can anyone suggest a good one that is working well for them? We are looking for one that is either free, or fairly inexpensive. Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress appears to be a front-runner for us, has anyone had any experience with this plugin? Thanks so much! Amiee

    | Amiee
    0

  • URL that we redirected are being crawled on Google Analytics. Since they dont exist, they have high bounce rates. What can the issue be?

    | prestigeluxuryrentals.com
    0

  • I'm doing a site audit for an organization that has a bunch of really messy old Drupal sites. In looking at their traffic, I see that a majority of it is coming to landing pages that look like this: http://clientsdomain.com/rss_feed173.8.208.97 plus other IP addresses. The bounce rate is 100% and time on site is less than a second. It looks like something that an RSS feed tool might use, but I've never seen something like it before. It creates its own landing page, hits the site, then appears to bounce. This is making their Analytics data look a whole lot worse than the site is actually doing, since the bounce rate is 100% on all that fake traffic. I have some experience with Drupal, but I've never seen anything like this in Drupal or any other CMS. Has anyone out there ever experienced something like this, where direct traffic comes to an rss feed landing page and bounces immediately?

    | newwhy
    0

  • I'm fairly new to SEO, and am left completely perplexed about why our two SEO client's links and DA decreased so drastically in so little time. Looking at their stats on Moz, between May and June, their DA's went down by 3-5 (which, they were fairly low to begin with), and external links were halved! This is rather concerning to me as building their external links has been my focus for the past few months for both of them. There are a number of tweaks that I could make to site structure in terms of meta descriptions and page title length (though I can't fix that as the clients want to keep the titles as is), however there are no critical errors. I have also placed a lot of filters on both of their Google Analytics pages as they were getting what I just now realized was a ton of spam, though I don't see how that would affect anything. I just can't imagine what lead to all of those external link suddenly dropping. I imagine the drastic drop in those lead to the DA decrease, but again, I'm very new, so I'm not certain. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. I have been panicking quite a bit since I've seen this!

    | everestagency
    0

  • Hi Guys I've been looking at the data for a client in Google analytics and I was wondering if anyone knows why some of the data doesn't tally up. In my case its the following: Under Aquisition
    No of Sessions
    for a Keyword shown in Organic Search tab (compared to)
    No of Clicks for a Query in the Search Engine Optimisation tab For example, for a brand term, Google are showing 17 Sessions in Organic Search.
    For the same term Google are showing 90 Clicks in the Queries section of Search Engine Optimisation OK, we know that Google are a little cloak and dagger regarding keyword data but surely Sessions and Clicks for the same keyword should be identical unless I'm missing something.

    | Relative
    0

  • I'm looking to add a click to call button, when a user lands on our quote page from a mobile phone. I'm wondering the best way of goal tracking? Our current method of tracking uses Events. I was wondering if this was a sensible way forward for this. The dev team are suggesting it may be a problem as it refreshes the page... I'm not a dev, so I don't fully understand it all! Thanks, Amelia

    | CommT
    0

  • Recently i have seen two clients sites see a spike in direct traffic coming from google.inc. Is this a bot/bug which i should filter out. Just a bit confused why google.inc has visited our clients site 676 times! Any insight would be great.

    | BlueWren
    1

  • There is a discrepancy between what an referring site is showing as clicks back to my site versus what Google Analytics is showing.  For example - They are stating that their site sent 100 clicks to my site.  The GA data shows 25 referred clicks from that site.  Could this be due to the "not provided" that hides most of the keyword data?

    | devonkrusich
    0

  • Hello All, In Google Analytics I see a bunch of traffic coming from "localhost:4444 / referral". I had tried once before to create a filter to exclude this traffic source, but obviously I did it wrong since it's still showing up. Here is the filter I have currently: Filter Name: Exclude localhost
    Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
    Filter Field: Referral
    Filter Pattern:  .localhost:4444.
    Case Sensitive: No Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong and give me a push in the right direction? Thanks in advance!

    | Robert-B
    0

  • I migrated a website from a .aspx to a .php and hence had to 301 all the old urls to the new php ones. It's been months after and I'm not seeing any of the php pages showing results but I'm still getting results from the old .aspx pages. Has any one had any experience with this issue or knows what to do? Many thanks,

    | CoGri
    0

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