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Category: Reporting & Analytics

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

  • Loui-60570


    Hi everyone, We have a weird issue in our Google Analytics account. We have enormous amount of direct traffic, but not to our homepage, but to blogs that are published and posted to facebook. e.g. yesterday we did a post and it received 3.500 visits of which 2.900 were direct. 
    I'm unable to figure out how this is possible. 90% of the direct traffic comes from mobile phones Anyone has an idea?

    | Loui-60570
    0
  • CassisGroup


    I have been seeing a trend for a while that is intesifying. My direct traffic numbers are down A LOT. We are not down 50% to LY (in actual number not just percentage of traffic) I am trying to understand what could be the causes of this issue. I was considering simply bigger meaner competition, but I actually perform decently on my returning customers.  Also my performance on my brand keyword is more inline with my current trend so I would except these KW to do equally as bad if the actual brand/store was the issue. The more surprising even, is the fact that I can trace back the start of the trend exactly to the day. Overnight on Sept 22 LY direct traffic went down 30% (to LY) when it was trending UP 20-25%(to LY) before. Now, we did do a redesign of the website on May 2011 (4 months before the drop), and did change host Oct 2011 (a couple weeks after the start of the trend). Do you have any clue as to why this could be happening? Did GA start tracking direct traffic differently?
    Any thoughts?

    | CassisGroup
    0
  • cindymariesilva


    When a user clicks through a lightbox gallery, are these counted as a click through for page rank? I am using WonderPlugin Grid Gallery on multiple pages with multiple galleries. I do not want these clicks to be wasted. Please advise. Regards, Clever Name SEO www.clevernameseo.com

    | cindymariesilva
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    We are looking at making our site HTTPS. We have been using the same Google Analytics account for years and I like having the historical data. All of our pages will be the same, we are just going to redirect from the http to https. Does anything need to be done with Google Analytics? What about other addons such as Optimizely, Crazy Egg, or Share this?

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • weddingshoesandaccessories


    My web site sells shoes. These items go out of fashion and are replaced. Shall I 301 a Url that has a discontinued product or shall we remove from Googles index using webmaster tools. I seem to have a massive 301 list that carries on growing and Im concerned that to carry on doing 301s is not the right way.

    | weddingshoesandaccessories
    0
  • Bio-RadAbs


    I've been scratching my head, chin, and you name it over this one. I have an advanced segment to remove bot traffic from my data. When I look at the Audience Overview data for a single month (let's say Aug). I am shown a session count. No problems here, however If I set the date range to (January - August). The august monthly stats is incorrect, much lower. What this means is that, if I export a CSV report from Jan-Aug, the data is wrong compared to individually recording a month. Anyone faced this? I've asked the question over at the Google Analytics technical section as well, but no answer P.S I even used the 'control the number of sessions used to calculate this report' tool but no luck.

    | Bio-RadAbs
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    With the announcement of benchmarking in Google Analytics I was wondering if I would have to upgrade to universal analytics or will it be available to everyone?

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • rhgraves65


    I know you can track subdomains by just selecting the proper code when you set up the analytics and then create filters for the data in analytics.  But how do you add a subdomain for existing analytics website. Is there a way to go back and change to the option to include subdomains and then I assume just replace the tracking code with the new code that Google delivers for this?

    | rhgraves65
    0
  • SmileMoreSEO


    Hello! Every time I log into Google Analytics (via desktop), the date range is set to October 1, 2013 to October 28, 2013. I've looked throughout the GA settings to find a place where I change this default setting to anything else ("Last week?") but have not be able to find where that setting is. Can you help? Losing my mind,
    Erik

    | SmileMoreSEO
    0
  • prsntsnh


    What tools can one use to audit a site to ensure that Google Analytics is capturing all the visits that we are getting? TIA Asif

    | prsntsnh
    0
  • mdmoz


    Hello, I need to make some major changes on my newly launched website which is already indexed by google and added in GWT. Now, do I bring the current version of site down? and use Google URL removal to delete URLs? The changes I am going to implement, is going to be alot, changes of contents, adding more pages, changing URL names and such. Also not to mention, site is so new, has not traffic. My plan is to have a fresh start with the new version. Your advice is appreciated.

    | mdmoz
    0
  • MBASydney


    Hi currently setting up custom alerts for a website. I want to do a custom alerts for when goal completions decrease or increase by a certain % e.g. 20% as shown in the third example from this Moz Article back in 2012 - http://moz.com/blog/7-essential-google-intelligence-custom-alerts-that-keep-me-sane However when i go into my GA account the only options seem to be for when the goal completion conversion rate % drops. I could use this, but i rather do just based on completions rather than %. Any ideas on how i can do this? Thanks.

    | MBASydney
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  • 352inc


    Does anyone have any experience tracking URLs that include hashes (#) using Universal Analytics and Google Tag Manager? Can it be done using GTM's container for UA, using the "more settings" options? Or building another tag to work with the GTM UA container? The fallback I'm considering is implementing the UA code in GTM for every page as Custom HTML with the "ga('send', 'pageview', location.pathname + location.search + location.hash);" solution, rather than GTM's specialized UA tag. I'm not yet sure what problems may arise from that, if any. Thanks in advance.

    | 352inc
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  • Patrick_G


    Hello all, I installed Google Analytics on a main website and a blog (blog.travelexinsurance.com) While it appears to be tracking correctly (and when I test it in real time it shows that I'm visiting) but it is treating the entire blog as though it's one page. So I can't see data on blog post X. All I see is that X visitors came to my blog in aggregate. So I see blog.travelex.com has 999 visitors, but it doesn't show that /travel-luggage got 50 visits, while /insurace-tips got 75 and so forth. I assume I screwed up the tracking somehow, but can't figure out where I went wrong. Tracking on the main domain works just fine. It's specific to the blog.

    | Patrick_G
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  • Zippy-Bungle


    I want to produce an excel spreadsheet that I can use to identify the best use of my content  Writing time. So Looking at a keyword list I want Current SERPS to show me where I am now? moz page difficulty score to show how hard I'll have to work google traffic estimate so that I can see the potential payoff. I can can generate all these separately but combining them is a huge time waster as invariably the results don't come back in quiet the same order and a line by line check is required. Part of the reason for doing this is keyword exploration so that we can find new niches by generating hundreds or thousands of keywords to test.

    | Zippy-Bungle
    0
  • Robbern


    Hi there, When I enter the site via Google Search and follow myself via Real-Time Analytics I appear an organic visitor (which is good). When I browse and visit the site I still am an organic visitor. However, as soon as I fill in the contact form (gravity forms) and land on the "thank you page" I appear as a direct visitor with Google as the source. Since I have the thank you page set-up as a goal, Analytics incorrectly attributes these conversions to the direct medium instead of the organic medium. The tracking code has been installed on all the pages and all conversions are being recorded. What is going on?

    | Robbern
    0
  • Zippy-Bungle


    I'd always though that CTR would increase with SERPS position but my data doesn't really seem to show that. I used google analytics/acquisition/SEO/Queries  and looked at the top 1800 queries. Then I filtered those with a CTR of 0 and for branded keywords. The result was as shown - a big glob with no real pattern other than a long tail of keywords with a 100% CTR Does this tell me anything useful or am I just wasting my time? Its probably worth stating that only 12 of my keywords had over 1000 impressions and none over 10,000 (all in top 10 though) - but thats a function of my industry sector gJgSNGL.png

    | Zippy-Bungle
    1
  • alrockn


    I've got 100s of new pages over a year old, all with quality content, yet they're all still at PR0.  The main index page has a PR score of 4, yet all the other pages of the site are still at 0.  They're are all unique and highly relevant pages.  Anybody else notice Google's taking longer to rank pages? Why is Google taking so long to update PageRank?

    | alrockn
    1
  • cbarron


    How could us have a situation in Google Analytics where the unique users for given page is higher than the number of sessions?

    | cbarron
    0
  • MattAntonino


    We have a problem similar to this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22229312/universal-analytics-could-not-track-transaction-in-magento On a client's website.  I need an absolute knock-out EXPERT at solving this to give us a quote on doing something like this.  It's very urgent but it is paid. Basically the site used the old tracking code, worked, then client said they wanted new data so we upgraded to Universal.  Now everything works but Ecommerce tracking.  Desperately need help! Thanks all!

    | MattAntonino
    0
  • HashtagHustler


    Good Afternoon! I touched on this question a while back in another post specifically regarding a plethora of duplicate pages that I was finding due to inappropriate tagging in wordpress. As I am going through our website, I am starting to notice it happening again with categories as well. I am including some pictures where you can see the URL structures and titles etc of how everything is laid out. I would like to clarify that I was not the one who did any of this Is it wrong/bad to cross categorize? What I mean by that is put something in more than one category? Would there be any drawback to converting any of these into subcategories? Would that even do anything? Does having two pages that are named the same thing, hurt you? It would seem to me that Google wouldn't like that. I have recently come into the field of thought that Google is getting more and more human, and If it makes a human uncomfortable/confused it will make Google confused. In my pictures you can see we clearly have numerous hard copies of the same thing, not just duplicate elements created by wordpress, that is a separate issue. I personally want to change all of the titles and make everything as different and individual as possible, but i also could be very wrong in my desire to do that. Any thoughts are appreciated! eY4iX2N N3AVqss JZpU7Rq

    | HashtagHustler
    0
  • tiffany1103


    In other words, how can see the text and what not it sees from start to finish on each page. I know there was a site, but I can't remember it.

    | tiffany1103
    0
  • Brand_Psychic


    Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!

    | Brand_Psychic
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    On the user flow report I am showing a first interaction of /category as my second highest starting page. If I click group details it shows some of my different categories. However, at the bottom of the user flow report it has some of the category pages out as individual categories. Why is this? And how do I force it to show all category pages together like it does with my /item pages?

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • Sandicliffe


    Hi Guys, I've been looking into my company's analytics's data recently to establish where most of our traffic is coming from. More so, I want to get an indication of the percentage of organic traffic that is coming from branded and none branded terms. Not provided takes up 80% of my organic traffic and the vast majority of keywords that are provided all mention the brand name. Does analytics's provide you with all of your branded traffic but just block others that it doesn't want you to see? Or is it just coincidence that the majority of the terms I can see are all branded? I am just trying to establish how strong our brand is and how much traffic the brand name brings against none brand terms. All help is appreciated! Thank you!

    | Sandicliffe
    1
  • TheJewelleryEd


    I noticed a small amount of traffic coming from a particular very generic keyword. Being pleasantly surprised that we are ranking for this, and after some digging, I found that we are actually ranking in Google images, rather than in the web results. How can I track whether other keywords are ranking in Google images? I use Rank Checker to track keywords in the main web results, but this doesn't have a function for Google Images. Help please - thanks.

    | TheJewelleryEd
    0
  • driveawayholidays


    Hi, We are trying to consolidate the amount of landing pages on our site, is there any way to find landing pages with a particular URL substring which have had 0 traffic? The minimum which appears in google analytics is 1 visit.

    | driveawayholidays
    0
  • Enrico_Cassinelli


    Hello to everyone, this is my first question (kind of a newbie here :-D). I have a website that spans over 4 subdomains + the main domain and I'd like to have a place where I can see the total page views, events and goal completions. Main domain is langhe.net, and subdomains are eventi.langhe.net, servizi.langhe.net, shop.langhe.net, about.langhe.net. The website is based on wordpress and I'm using google analytics for wordpress by yoast as analytics plugin. The configuration of the plugin is as follows: all the website have the same UA-XXXXXXXX code The Subdomain Traking field (setDomainName) is filled with .langhe.net Cross-Domain tracking is enabled Cross-Domain Primary Domain (setDomainName) is langhe.net Cross-Domain Tracking, Other Domains field is filled with: about.langhe.net, eventi.langhe.net, servizi.langhe.net, shop.langhe.net. In the GA property I've created an Advanced Custom Filter configured this way: Field A -> Extract A = hostname (.*) Field B -> Extract B = request URI (.*) Output To -> Constructor = request URI $A1$B1 Field A Required: yes Field B Required: No Override Output Field: yes Case Sensitive: no I was wondering it this is the best way of doing it, or if there are other "best practice" ways to obtain what I'm looking for (for example with this configuration it's become quite difficult to separate the traffic sources for each website). Thank you in advance 🙂
    Cheers!

    | Enrico_Cassinelli
    0
  • lincolndigitalgroup


    Hello, could someone please elaborate on what is meant by "External Followed Links" vs. "Total External Links"? Does "External Followed Links" mean the number of links that are generating traffic to the site? Or is there some other way to conceptualize it? Any help would be appreciated! Thank you in advance.

    | lincolndigitalgroup
    1
  • carl_daedricdigital


    Hi all Wondering if i could pick the brains of those wise than myself... my client has an https website with tons of pages indexed and all ranking well, however somehow they managed to also set their server up so that non https versions of the pages were getting indexed and thus we had the same page indexed twice in the engine but on slightly different urls (it uses a cms so all the internal links are relative too). The non https is mainly used as a dev testing environment. Upon seeing this we did a google remove request in WMT, and added noindex in the robots and that saw the index pages drop over night. See image 1. However, the site still appears to getting return for a couple of 100 searches a day! The main site gets about 25,000 impressions so it's way down but i'm puzzled as to how a site which has been blocked can appear for that many searches and if we are still liable for duplicate content issues. Any thoughts are most welcome. Sorry, I am unable to share the site name i'm afraid. Client is very strict on this. Thanks, Carl image1.png

    | carl_daedricdigital
    0
  • JustinTaylor88


    Hey Mozzers Recently a client of ours undertook a paid campaign using Taboola and have a vast difference between reported clicks and visitors reported by GA. On further investigation the _utm.gif event is sent to google-analytics.com 50% of the time and stat.g.doubleclick.net the remaining 50% of the time Is this likely to be the cause of the discrepancy and if so is it possible to resolve this without removing the remarketing tag (which seems to be responsible for stats.g.doublelclick.net). Many thanks Justin

    | JustinTaylor88
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  • Fammy


    Is it possible to have too much content? If so, how do we prove (or at least get evidence) one way or the other to whether we are being adversely affected in the SERPs? The only way we could think of is to publish a lot less for a week or two, but nobody is willing to risk it. Numbers wise we are publishing an average of 125 articles a day, with an archive of around 300k fwiw thanks 🙂

    | Fammy
    0
  • SJVC_Susie


    Our site is seeing a huge spike in direct (none) traffic from IE 7 from July 8, 2014 - on. June 25 - July 7 showed 21 direct visits from IE 7; July 8 - July 20 is showing 5,889 (an increase of 27,943%). All traffic from the spike is going to our homepage. Other Google Analytics' stats for this direct (none) IE 7 traffic: Bounce Rate: 99.52%
    Avg. Session Duration: 0:02
    Pages/session: 1.01
    Mostly all new users What's strange is that the traffic is from a variety of cities and networks. What could be causing this? Has anyone experienced this before?

    | SJVC_Susie
    0
  • HashtagHustler


    Hey Everybody, So I am getting to the point where I need to disavow some backlinks. I am noticing a discrepancy between the OSE backlinks and the GWMT backlinks. My question is do I put both sets of links in the Disavow tool? Just the links from GWMT? Just the links from OSE? Etc... Etc... Thanks Everybody!

    | HashtagHustler
    0
  • Twist360


    From my experience it seems to update once per day (every 24 hours), can anyone confirm this is the case or have a link to an official announcement which confirms how often the data updates? It would be handy to know when it updates so we can see the latest information as it comes in.

    | Twist360
    0
  • whis


    We've seen around a 25% drop in Google referral traffic from the 14th July 2014 onwards and having real trouble identifying why and from what search terms we're being effected. WMT and Moz Pro don't show any movement. Is anyone else seeing the same thing on UK search terms? Seems a bit late to be the effect of Panda 4.0? Any help would be amazing. Thanks.

    | whis
    1
  • rmazur


    Hello, I am helping a client track traffic using Google Analytics.  We recently just signed an agreement with a publisher and they have given original credit using a canonical link.  How can I track this? I believe it is showing up under direct/ none and I don't know to measure the success of our new partnership.

    | rmazur
    0
  • ScottOlson


    I have a couple questions 1) Is there any SEO value to forwarding multiple domains to the same domain? For instance, we own dozens of of the same domain name but with International extensions. I haven't seen much on this topic and assume that Google ignores such domain names (they don't really have much of any links to them). 2) Is there any research on whether time on site is declining across the web? I've noticed a trend over the years but I want to make sure this is a standard user behavior as people jump around quicker and search hop for information.

    | ScottOlson
    0
  • mblsolutions


    Hello, On May 12th my average session duration within Google Analytics went from 1.12 seconds to 10 seconds. Every month since then it has had an average session duration of around 10 seconds. My traffic over this time has increased. I am concerned that the website is being attacked by bots. What should I be looking out for to work out what is happening? Many thanks for your help.

    | mblsolutions
    0
  • WebMarketingHUB


    Hi, I would like to filter out traffic in GA that comes to my client site just to login into their application. Is there a way to create a filter or segment that if a visitor exits the site to a subdomain it will filter them out? For example, they land on the homepage (abc.com/), click the login tab (drop down screen) and login and go to their application dashboard (app.abc.com/). I would like to delete this traffic segment as it is creates high bounce rates and makes it difficult to test landing pages. Thanks so much, Donna 🙂

    | WebMarketingHUB
    0
  • OlegKorneitchouk


    I set up 8 goals in analytics and Google seems to have auto placed them into their own Goal sets (first 5 = Goal Set 1, last 3 are Goal Set 2). http://awesomescreenshot.com/05134f1tad Any idea how to edit and group these up myself?

    | OlegKorneitchouk
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi Mozzers, I am running into an issue where my client's website ( can refer to domain.com) uses a third party checkout site called rezovation that we can refer to checkout.rezovation.com: I went through this doc here https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cross-domain and https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/ecommerce (for universal analytics) and I still find it confusing so here are my questions: According to my understanding I need a customized GATC to link both domains checkout.rezovation.com and domain.com? If yes(above), do we setup one customized GATC for cross domain tracking on all pages from checkout.rezovation.com and domain.com? if it is the case can someone provide detail steps on how to set it up ( I am not a coder so the easier the guideline, the better) Once cross domain tracking is set up, e commerce tracking code should be only on thank you page should be looking like the image below? Should i add manually all the extra code for the ecommerce tracking code or I can get it done via a third party website? Thank you guys! oPgn8P4.png

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • SamCUK


    I've had a spiky organic traffic profile for some time and wondered if anyone could suggest what penalty might have hit me. Something did in July but then when it recovered (not sure how) I ended up with double the traffic. Then it dipped, recovered a but and has slowly declined since. I've had no manual penalties so it must be algorithmic which means I can fix it. The problem is I don't know what the issues is! Any help appreciated! Ae00Lzl.png

    | SamCUK
    0
  • HashtagHustler


    My immediate thought is that a link from a website that has a PA/DA of 1 for both or either metric would be absolutely worthless, but I just wanted to make sure. Could this also be from it being recently indexed? Also is there a rule of thumb that anybody knows, or tries to follow at least? Obliviously the higher the better, but for example; A PA/DA of 15 and below is SPAM A PA/DA of 30 and above is GOOD A PA/DA of 50 is GREAT PA/DA of 80 is AMAZING PA/DA of 100 is GODTIER

    | HashtagHustler
    0
  • IceIcebaby


    Hi Moz Community, I need help understanding why my site is dropping rankings and traffic significantly. We were hit the hardest with doing a image query filter ~6/2-6/3 (image attached). We also had a site migration on this exact date, but didn't change URL structure or domain names, just switched hosting sites. I'm assuming this plummet is from the migration, but can't figure out why. I may also not be understanding this filter clearly so let me know. Shoot any questions my way that could help your understanding of the problem be more clear. Thanks,
    -Reed yVzQRTK

    | IceIcebaby
    0
  • theLotter


    I am getting 2 completely different numbers in Google Analytics.According to the graph on my Dashboard organic traffic decreased ~40% comparing June 7 -> June 6.However, when I dig a bit deeper and look at the 2 dates specifically compared to each other I get a `3% increase in traffic.When I look at the traffic on just June 7, I get the number indicating the increase.Any ideas or someone getting similar conflicting numbers??

    | theLotter
    0
  • mozwoz


    I have setup ‘Not Provided’ filter, but it is not tracking conversions accurately. Basically the filter displays goals url’s as conversion urls & not the landing url’s. For example – I would expect home page to have maximum conversions, but its shows higher visits & no conversions.  Has anyone experienced this? I have attached screenshot of the ‘Not provided’ Filter. 0L0fS3h SxzRP7w

    | mozwoz
    0
  • AshShep1


    When checking to see my anchor text profile to make sure it's not too dense with the same phrases, should I be measuring against my whole site or page specific? eg if i have 100 links across my site and 20 are for the same phrase this is 20%, but if the same 20 phrases are to one page and that page has 40 links this is 55% Many thanks Ash

    | AshShep1
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    On my Google Analytics page it says at the top "Upgrade to Universal Analytics Upgrade to get a deeper understanding of your users through new tools and more accurate data." Below that it talks about how to do it. I do not see what they are talking about for "Select an account and a property, then click Universal Analytics Upgrade." But if I can into my change history is shows Changed By-System Property "http://www123.com" started transfer to Universal Analytics processing." This was on May 22nd and it hasn't said anything since. Why does it keep telling me to do it if it already has? It doesn't say transfer complete anywhere so I don't know if it finished or not.

    | EcommerceSite
    0
  • FindLaw


    Testing.

    | FindLaw
    0

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