Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: Reporting & Analytics

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


  • Hello there, I'm first gonna explain what I did to my website: I was using a 302 redirect to send from http to https, fixed it to a 301. My url has a keyword and I was using many pages with keywords as well. ex) www.keywordhaha.com/keyword-the-best , www.keywordhaha.com/keyword-easiest-on-keyword-market Changed it to : www.keywordhaha.com/app , www.keywordhaha.com/games, etc... I was not using any crawler tools, so I added Schema.org, Json-LD and rdfa-node, which are all working properly. Synced my page with our Google+ page, which was recognised by Google Added a proper logo and fb:admins, and was recognised by facebook. After I did all this optimisations, I experienced an immediate traffic drop (10%) and my impressions/clicks according to the webmaster tools dropped 75%, in a 2 day period. Any ideas where there could have been a mistake? mPdhFdG.png

    | jancpc
    0

  • Hi everybody. I'm currently doing a backlink audit for a client and I've hit a small problem. I'm combining data from Ahrefs, OSE, Webmaster Tools and Link Detox. I've got around 27k links in total now, but the issue is that WMT does not provide data on target page, anchor text and nofollow/dofollow. This means I have around 1k links with only partial information. Does anyone know of a way that I can get this data automatically? Thanks!

    | Blink-SEO
    1

  • Hello Experts, Can you please tell me Universal Analytics Tracking code for Measuring Addition/Removal from Cart via GTM? Any one tell me process and code? Thanks!

    | bkmitesh
    0

  • Hello Expert, If i want to track all types of clicks either link, button, drop down etc for my website then what parameters i add in "Event Tracking parameters" and what will be firing rules. I already have universal analytic and google tag manager.  Track Type as even i selected in google tag manager now please tell me 1) what i add in category, Action, label? 2) what should be the rule. I will be really thankful to you if you give cut to cut answer instead of sharing post.

    | bkmitesh
    0

  • The organic traffic to our site (fairly new) took a ~50% hit about a month ago due to the drop in our most important keyword. The numbers have come back up and are now exceeding the number before the dip. While this is all fine and dandy, we're still not ranking in the top 50 for our most valuable keyword. We've put out a number of guest post on reputable outside sites and are building a regular cadence of those posts, but my question is, what is the realistic wait time for those organic rankings to increase again?

    | smf43434
    0

  • So I noticed a significant (around 50%) drop in Direct traffic in analytics to one of my websites (compared to last month). I've also noticed a spike in Adwords for around the same number of sessions. The drop in traffic is pretty much isolated to one specific page, and it is the same page involved in the spike in Adwords. Is it possible that Google was not recognizing a portion of the Adwords traffic? That's the only theory I have, but we haven't changed anything with their tracking or Adwords, so I'm a little hesitant to go with that theory.

    | KiyoW
    0

  • I'm using an appointment form on my website and I have the option to add a referral url to form submissions so that i know which pages the form submission came from. I need to be able to distinguish between organically generated form submissions and those that come in via AdWords. If referral url shows the AdWords tracking code i know the form submission came in from AdWords. My problem is that when a visitor comes in after clicking an ad and then visits another page on my website that AdWords tracking code disappears from the url. I was told that there was a way to turn on persistent urls in WordPress but I can't figure out how to do it. I'm assuming that if i turn persistent urls on the AdWords tracking code will remain on every subsequent url that they visit on my website. Is this true? Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.

    | SpaMedica
    0

  • Hi guys, We have eCommerce.
    We connected the site to the Google analytic eCommerce.
    Everything was work fine until 3 weeks ago.  Suddenly we stooped getting purchases  information in the analytic although i see purchases  in the website. We didn't change anything in the website and i really don't know how to solve this problem.
    If someone here can point me where i can get some info on how to fix it it can be great. Thanks a lot!

    | WayneRooney
    0

  • I have created new account in google tag manager 2.0 Now can any body help me how to track event in  GTM 2.0? Like example  this is the site - flipkart(dot)com if you little bit scroll down then there is 3 tab ( pfa of snapshot)  - 1) new arrivals 2) Men's Bestsellers 3) Women's Bestsellers. So i want to know that if anyone click on tabs or button given above then 1) what steps to do in tag manager then 2)  what changes i have to update on my site and 3) where to check in google analytic on which tab visitor has clicked. Please tell me tracking and code for only above given 3 buttons. As on web i am very confused looking lots of post. Your inputs very valuable to me.......................bkmitesh thESmOe

    | bkmitesh
    0

  • I'm working on a site that has low traffic volumes due to its niche.  That's fine but we are daily getting referral traffic from unrelated domains without a link.  These visits are always 100% bounce which is impacting the overall click.through rate.  The domains are not the same and different ones come through all the time, so it is difficult to keep on top of. Any ideas what could be going on here and an effective way of dealing with this?

    | MickEdwards
    0

  • Hi there, On my ecommerce, in order to find out the number of transactions that came directly from my social channels I go to Acquisition->Channels and then I look at the column Transactions for the Social channel. Surprisingly this number differ from the one that I find under Acquisition->Social->Overview and then I select Transaction under Conversions. Then I look at Last interaction Social Conversions to find the number of transactions. The two quantities are totally different for a month window and they should be the same. Can any of you explain to me the reason why? Thanks and regards

    | footd
    0

  • Hello Experts, How many ways to use Event in Google Tag Manager for Event Tracking? As per me there are 5 ways given below are they correct? 2nd thing if yes can you please please tell me procedure of using all or which is the best one to use? HTML 5 Data Attributes Classic Google Analytics Example: _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/downloads/pdfs/corporateBrief.pdf']);
    3) Universal Analytics Example: ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’, ‘page path’); query string? or is it possible without any coding on website we can configure id's in google tag manager? Thanks! BK Mitesh

    | bkmitesh
    0

  • Looking at the section: Conversions > Goals > Overview   -   does Google Analytics provide real time / same day metrics for this conversion data or does it take 24 hrs?

    | Rich_Coffman
    0

  • For my E commerce site in my google analytic in Event Action it is showing "Button Clicked" and Total Events 4005, so i want to know visitors have clicked on which buttons?

    | bkmitesh
    0

  • Hi there, While you can now filter out bots and spiders in Google Analytics, I'm interested in how you identify a bots and spiders in the first place. For example, it used to be thought that Googlebot wouldn't appear in GA as it 'couldn't process Javascript' but now Google has announced new developments for its crawler with regards to interpreting javascript and CSS, this argument isn't as cut and dry. I'm not suggesting Googlebot appears in Google Analytics, but I am saying that you can't make the case that it won't appear only because it can't interpret JavaScript. So, I'm interested to see what metrics you use to identify a bot? For me, the mix of Users > Browser, Users > Operating System Version is still quite handy, but is it possible to identify individual bots and spiders within Google Analytics? And would Googlebot appear?

    | ecommercebc
    0

  • Looking at a client's analytics - one page doesn't seem to record 'average time on page' data (it just displays 0.00 despite it receiving traffic) This isn't an issue for the rest of the website's pages. Any idea? http://www.smilestyledental.co.uk/ppc/general-dentistry-at-smile-style.html thanks for any help!

    | dentaldesign
    0

  • Good morning, Webmaster Tools is reporting an increase in server errors on our site due to some very suspect links from Yeusaigon.net. After taking a quick look, it appears they are some form of search engine attempting to link to our images by using incomplete URLs. For example: http://yeusaigon.net/search/images.php?q=htc%20one%20max%20phone%20cases&page=1044 Is linking to: http://www.mobilemadhouse.co.uk/caseflex-htc-one-max-real-leather-flip... As this URL is incomplete, it's throwing up a server error. There are currently 139 instances of there errors from the same domain, and is increasing by around 5-10 per day. The domain, however, is linking to some of our pages/images correctly, but I fear Google may look at these as spammy links - they certainly look that way! So, what can we do? I can't find any contact details on Yeusaigon website so I have disavowed the entire domain. Is this the right thing to do? How do I stop the ever-increasing number of sever errors due to incorrect URLs? Cheers, Lewis

    | PeaSoupDigital
    0

  • Hello, Case study: 
    I changed all the links from an online store as follows: Before: www.domain.com/store1/category/product (link to a product, in magento e-commerce)
    After: www.domain.com/category/product (link to a product). Basically I removed the stores, and made 1 default / base store, and put a 301 redirect (from .htacces). My question is:
    1. How bad i broke the seo, cause i was no.1 on 30 keywords with these structure of links, and these kinds of link had page rank 2-3.
    2. Does redirect 301 from old link, transfer the Page rank?
    3. I should modify all link from link building  to the new link? I mean urgent?
    4. Does google will reindex the keywords with the new links? Thank you in advance. 
    With respect,
    Shanaki

    | Shanaki
    0

  • A bit confused about my seo reports for a site I am tracking in Moz. Google webmaster reports i have 1836 links to my domain.
    Moz reports 273 external followed links.
    Website Auditor reports 449 dofollow and 338 no follow.> total 787
    What is important factor that I should be reporting to my client that really matters?

    | KenW
    0

  • Hi All, I have switched my website from http to https After switching from http to https all goal conversions in Google analytics showing under referral.I have also updated the GA code for https. Please help me out to fix the issue. Thanks

    | Alick300
    0

  • In universal analytic we can use more than 20 dimension and metric so can anyone tell me how to configure such feature 1) with google tag manager 2) without google tag manager. Like i read to this level - http://imgur.com/kjA4I91   but dont know what to do further? Regards, Jackin

    | jackinmathis1
    0

  • We have a few accounts under one Google login. They all have separate Google analytics codes but one of the sites is somehow pulling in some data from another site but the other site has not got the same analytics code on it. Not sure how this is happening and what we can do about this, is it a bug in the Google Analytics system? Any help would be appreciated.

    | dentaldesign
    0

  • Hi, We will be launching a new redesign for our website. There will be new URLs and navigation and almost everything (except for static pages like about and contact) will be different. The overwhelming opinion seems to say that it's important to keep the same Google Analytics profile. How can we compare the past URLs to the new ones if they are completely different. Does anyone have any experience in this? Did you create any segmentation? Thanks 🙂

    | WSteven
    0

  • I'm trying to track in Google Analytics how many people are clicking the Facebook "share" button. I'm not sure if I have it properly set up. Here's the link that I followed to set up the tracking in analytics: http://www.simoahava.com/analytics/google-tag-manager-track-social-interactions/

    | EPICcreative
    0

  • Hi there, Since a few weeks we have started a cooperation with a big online wholesale company which now sells our products. I want to import simple E-commerce data: amount of transactions and revenue. More detailed data such as amount of products, name of products, etc. is not necessary in the first place. Now I discovered the 'data import' functionality in Google Analytics but I can't find any suitable option for E-commerce data import. The data from the wholesale company is gathered in a nice export in a separate system, so there should be a way ti import this data into Analytics. Could anybody help me with this? Any advice is welcome! Thanks in advance.
    Marcel

    | MarcelMoz
    0

  • I hope someone can give me some insight here, or at least point me in the right direction. As of September 1 we are running Adwords. We are seeing an alarming drop in our organic traffic since then. It's almost like Adwords is cannibalizing organic. August/September Paid 116/847 Organic 648/178 We've looked at why the Organic could have dropped (penalties, site function issues, etc.) and have found nothing unusual. Can someone give me a reason why this might be happening, Why such a dramatic decrease just as adwords is started. Thanks!

    | Britewave
    0

  • I was checking out our GWT this morning and noticed a new column on the far right that was labeled "Value". Currently, there isn't anything of value (no pun intended) listed just $Nan. Anyone else see this or know what it might be? 014pThY

    | Shawn_Huber
    0

  • I was going through Google Analytics, specifically looking at the Channels under Acquisition. I found a number of sites that Google is giving credit as sources of traffic. 
    When I went to the sites, however, and searched the page source for links to my site, I could not find any. My site is www.towermarketing.net. The sites being listed by GA are:
    blackhawkhardware.com
    musicas.baixar-musicas-gratis.com If anyone can tell me how Tower is getting traffic from these sites, and what I can do to fix it - because at this point I am considering them spam - I would appreciate it. Thanks!

    | TowerMarketing
    0

  • How could Google Analytics be reporting data if my pages don't have the GA code on them? Mike

    | Mike_c
    0

  • I was just reviewing my Moz report and came across something I could use advice on. The Keyword is "irish cardigans" I just moved to down a place to #5. I was going to add content to the page and back link a little to get back up on rankings but I noticed it is not all matching up. My Keyword is "irish cardigans" My Url is structured: products/traditional-irish-clothing-arans My metatitle is: Irish Sweaters - Traditional Irish Clothing - Arans & Cardigans The content title on the page heading is: Irish Sweaters and Cardigans. How will I change this to get my ranking better for "Irish Cardigans" The Page is also ranking for "Traditional Irish Clothing and Irish Sweaters" How do I know if I structure it to "Irish Cardigans" I will not loose traffic etc from the other keywords. Thanks

    | robbieire
    0

  • Hello All, I'm attempting to see why organic search bounce rate has increased by 5% when compared to last year for a certain section of my website. I am using a custom segment to filter the specific pages I want to look at. Once the custom segment is set, I go to Acquisition - > Channels - > Organic. Then, I click the Landing Pages tab. Because we don't have keyword data anymore the only thing I can look at is the landing pages that contributed to the change in bounce. Finally, I set my date range and compare to the same date range as last year. Once I set the date range I am presented with a list of URLs and the percent change in bounce rate for each URL. This is where I get confused. If you look at the average bounce rate at the top of the column (example 1 attached) it does not add up with the data below it. If you export all of the data to excel, and then do an "Average" function in Excel, the data adds up to 17.29% instead of 35.04% for Sept. 2013. Why does this not add up? Isn't GA calculating the Average? Also, I always notice several URLs with only 1 session per URL. Several of these 1 session URLs have a 100% bounce rate. Since the bounce rate at the top of the column (example1) is a reflection of the average bounce rate, wouldn't these 1 session URLs significantly distort my data? I ultimately just want to see the pages that are contributing to the increased bounce rate when compared to last year. Having a hard time figuring this one out. Thank you all, Dave zMfAGls

    | DaveGuyMan
    0

  • Hey Everyone, I finally figured out how to use auto event tracking with Google Tag Manager, but didn't get the data I wanted. I want to see what users are typing into the search field on my site (the URL structure of my site isn't set up properly to use GA's built-in site search tracking). So, I set up the form submit event tracking in Google Tag Manager and used the following as my event tracking parameters: Category: Search Action: Search Value When I test and look in Google Analytics I just see: "search" and "search value." I wanted to see the text that I searched on my site. Not just the Action and Category of the event.... Is what I'm trying to do even possible? Do I need to set up a different event tracking parameter? Thanks everyone!

    | DaveGuyMan
    0

  • If website is affected by Panda updates then how do we know that? If have any type of tools or strategies or alert to find out affected website by Panda then update as soon as possible.

    | renukishor
    0

  • Hi, I have a website with a client access on a subdomain. I want to exclude the traffic to that subdomain because it messes up my conversion goal for the main site. Per example, 2 out of 10 visitors are existing clients that want to access to my SaaS product. The 8 other are potential clients. I want to exclude the 2 clients from my stats so I could have the good conversion percentage for my free trial for the other 8 potential clients. Thanks in advance for your help!

    | slestage
    0

  • Hi In terms of looking at the overall User Experience of a website is there any particular areas of Google analytics that you believe to be particularly useful to identify areas of worry or opportunity?

    | TheZenAgency
    1

  • Hey guys, I have an eCommerce client who sometimes runs Google PLA and Google Shopping campaigns. However, we don't run his AdWords for him, just do his SEO. At the moment, the Shopping campaigns track as organic traffic within Analytics. And I can't see any way to change this! It's so infuriating. How do I change this? Thanks!

    | jasarrow
    0

  • Hello Experts, I have an e-commerce website. Google Analytic configured in Google Tag manager. Now in google analytic I have "ON" the Enable Ecommerce. Now i have to do ecommerce tracking installation and set-up? So can you please let me know the procedure? Regards, Jackin

    | jackinmathis1
    0

  • One of our clients launched a new e-commerce site and there was a significant (60%) drop in traffic in Google Analytics following the launch. We are about 10 days into the new site, and our suspicion is that the move has caused a decrease in their site authority which has lowered their search position. The old site had the store at sitename.com/store. The new site has a Shopify store at shop.sitename.com. There were very few external followed links to the store pages, so we thought that there would be little effect for overall site traffic by moving the store to a subdomain. Any recommendations for next steps on diagnosing the problem and working towards a solution?

    | DesignHammer
    0

  • Hello Mozzers, I have a couple of anaytics questions I wanted to ask. What does 'Not Set' refer to? I assume it is when the user has switched off cookies, but was wondering if this is correct or if there were other circumstances that would trigger this? When I look at my reverse goal paths, the same page is in path 1, 2 and 3... Are the pages refreshing? Thanks! Amelia

    | CommT
    0

  • Hi All- Context: A site has been redesigned. Pages were renamed in the process. Problem: It's very hard to compare before and after metrics because the page URLs are not the same. Question: Anyone know how to do this in Google Analytics? I'm hoping there's some simple trick I just don't know about. D

    | DonnaDuncan
    0

  • Hello Experts, I want to migrate from classical to universal analytics and i am already using GTM for my ecommerce site. I have small 6 queries :- After login to google analytics from admin section i have to transfer property to universal analytics ? right? I have to wait either 24 hours or 48 hours before retagging or doing any changes in UA. So how can i know my property transferred sucessfully? After property transferred to universal analytics, i have to configure the session timeout and campaign timeout periods via the Google Analytics Admin page. ( By default,
    sessions end after 30 minutes and campaigns end after 6 months ) is it okay if i don't change this settings? As of now in my analytic i have configured google adwords, google webmaster and google merchant. In analytic i have also set custom alerts, goals, funnels, enchance link attribution, eCommerce etc but google analytics code i have already added in google tag manager, so i have to some manual changes for all such things? or all the things i.e goals, funnel, alerts etc will be transferred automatically at time of transferring the property? In Google tag manager i have already configured following things :- Tags :- Name - Google adwords Conversion Tracking b) Type - Adwords Conversion Tracking c) Rules - order sucessful page Name - Google Analytic Page view Tracking b) Type - Classic Google Analytics c) Rules - All pages Name - Google Analytic Conversion Tracking b) Type - Classic Google Analytics c) Rules - order sucessful page Name - Twitter Conversion Tracking b) Type - Custom HTML tag c) Rules - order sucessful page So at time of transferring property all this will be transferred automatically? Also at thank you page of my website I have scripts for goal setting, Affiliator, so there is no relation of this with migration right? Kind co-operation in the matter of highly be appreciated. So please help me! Regards,
    Jackin!

    | jackinmathis1
    0

  • I am investigating a two-month 25% drop in organic traffic from Google to a client's site.  When I turned to the Webmaster Tools data for the site, there is a clear, gradual drop over the course of a couple months both in impressions and clicks.  In general, the drop occurred across many pages and for a large number of queries; there wasn't a core group of keywords or pages that saw the drop...it was more sitewide.  Yet, the average rankings reported by WMT were, for the top 100 or so landing pages, not significantly different. The site hosts information about medical conditions, and I wouldn't expect any time-related variations in search volume, and this was confirmed by looking at Google Trends data for a number of the top keywords.  I started to look at the data by query for all the top keywords (all ranked in the top 10), and saw the following general trend:  impressions were down, rankings stayed in the top 10, and Google Trends showed either flat or rising volumes. So I am trying to make sense of that.  If the search volume trend did not decline and rankings held inside the top 10, then how could the number of impressions drop significantly?  Am I trusting the WMT data too much?  But the reality is that the volume of traffic measured by Google Analytics from Google organic did indeed drop the way Webmaster Tools show it.

    | WillW
    0

  • Interesting to see in Google Analytics that the conversion rate is higher than landing page visits - could it be attributed to a visitor clicking the CTA button multiple times? Or perhaps there is duplicate GA code on the conversion page since we utilize both Google Analytics and HubSpot. (see attached funnel screenshot) Screen-Shot-2014-09-26-at-10.49.09-AM.png

    | W21
    0

  • Hi I have a google analytics query.
    I have a main site with a google analytics tag and I have 2 forms that sit on a subdomain with a different GA code.  As I would like to measure end to end tracking, I would like the same GA code on the subdomain. What is the best way for me to implement this? Would I need to make some changes to the GA code that sits on the main site or can I add the the GA code from the main site onto the subdomain? Thanks

    | Niki_1
    0

  • I have created a test view but that is not helping with skewed data.  Do you all just create a total separate profile with a different GA account for a non-indexed domain?  How can I test tag manager and other things without messing with our data?  I have our IP filtered out so it doesn't show up in reports but other event tags from outsiders will.

    | Sika22
    0

  • Hey Moz Community, We received an interesting email this morning from a client's marketing manager asking if we knew about or have ever used "Hadoop software" because "[Business owner name] says it’s supposed to help us see how people use our website and more." I've never heard of this software and upon looking around on the web, it says it can do a lot, but my client is a small law firm who average 800-1,000 visitors per month, mainly from their 2 local office cities/markets. Anyone have any thoughts on this or ever use this software? Thanks in advance. Patrick

    | WhiteboardCreations
    0

  • Whenever I use site:domain.com to check what's index, it's pretty much always in the same order. I gather from this, the order is not random. I'm also reasonably certainly it isn't related to any page strength signals or ranking results. So, does anyone know why the pages are displayed in the order they are? What information does the order of the pages tell me? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    1

  • Hi there, I want to track the repeat buyers on my ecommerce. In order to do that, I am going to create a custom dimension on Analytics. The custom dimension will be called "repeat_buyers" with scope user because I want to track the user over time. Is my assumption correct? How would you you set it up? When I have this dimension, I would just apply the default metric transaction on my reports. I don't have experiencie on custom dimensions so I might be totally wrong. Can you please help? Thanks and regards

    | footd
    0

  • I was going throught the list of keywords that have sent traffic to my site over the last 7 years and cam across one "A516 grade 70" that had hundreds of variants. Now in a lot of cases search volumes were different as were SERPS. We've tested a few variants with reworked pages (70% similar to original but optimised for variant keyword)  and see good SERPS and traffic results. Theres obviously some diminishing returns here for us but the interesting question is when to these variants become an exact match and when not? In some cases the variants are unique because of the spacig, periods and hyphens used. there isn't a clear correlation with exact matc though. Insight appreciated. (Sorry for spelling errors. Form doesn't play nicely with iPad)

    | Zippy-Bungle
    0

  • I've been chipping away at the SEO for a client's site for about 6 weeks and a few days ago noticed a huge spike in organic traffic for about a dozen keywords. See attached. Previously traffic was around 20-30 unique new visitors a day. On the 17 it went up to 500+ for 1 day, now it's come back down again. This spike was not for 1 keyword but for about a dozen. I've never seen this before and wondered if anyone had experienced similar. The site is about 3 months old. ebix3rl

    | deployseo
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.