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.


  • google analytics

    I recently received help on a question I asked on SEOmoz but need additional clarification.  I am trying to set up goals in Google Analytics for people who click on a “purchase botton” which sends them to PayPal.  I created a Thank You page and tried to get PayPal to redirect to it, however, our customers only get  to our site’s 404 page. Here is what I’ve done so far: Went into my PayPal account and turned the “Auto Return” to ‘on’ Under website payment preferences, I added the following URL http://www.teecycle.org/thank-youutm_nooverride1.  (I formatted the URL this way because the person who provided me with help recommended using the format ?UTM_nooverride=1.  However, our CMS system won’t allow “?” or “=”)

    | EricVallee34
    0

  • google tag manager

    I'm using an Element Visibility trigger to track a value that appears on a page. However, I want to track this value even when the user doesn't scroll to the area of the page where the element is (i.e. when the page is loaded, and the value is displayed below the fold, but the user doesn't scroll down there). Is there a way of doing this

    | RWesley
    0

  • gdpr google analytics

    On December 1 and 2, I implemented a cookie banner on 5 of my Wix sites (https://www.sanitationsolutionsinc.com is one example) in order to be in compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD. Since then my traffic according to Wix Analytics and Google Analytics has plummeted. Anyone else have the same issue? How did you fix it?

    | Jason_Taylor
    0

  • Hi, I hope you are doing well. I want know how is looking my website? Is that attractive or  boring for visitor. I really need your answer to improve my website. My Website is: https://sortscut.com/

    | Pauline21
    0

  • Hii 
    I'm john.  I am a blogger.  I want to change my domain. This is my domain (https://playfireboywatergirl.com/)
    I want to redirect to the **.org **domain.  But I work hard on my site .com  and also the authority of my site in Google. Kindly help how can I redirect from one domain to another. can google convert authority of my to another site?

    | John_smith45
    0

  • How to protect the site from fake traffic On Google Analytic there are no visits, but on the front of the site there are 6000 jetpack wordpress statistique https://arabtechnologie.com/

    | BELGHOUL
    0

  • ...if yes, how?  Can you share resources / blogs / etc...  I want to reverse my site's rankings. Here's the gist of it: I recently purchased a website that has 600+ pieces of aged content on it. Domain was ranking great about 10 years ago  (1M uniques a year) It apparently got hit by a G algo update in 2012/2013 (Penguin and Panda?), because the rankings have tanked (10 hits a day) In the past two years, the previosu owner published about 100+ off-topic blog posts and it appears been using the site as a PBN. The UX sucks and there's a ton of 404s. (NOTE: I am in the process of removing that content and have cleaned up the 404s). Domain stats: 20+ years old (1998) and DA 32, linking domains 850+, inbound links of 16k+ What I've done: disavow (550 domains), fix all the 404s What I'm doing / about to do: remove spammy content write new/fresh on-topic content update the site UX start a backlink building campaign My questions: is it common to bounce back from a G algo update? is it hard / am I over my head / am I a sucker trying to get the site back alive? are there articles about bouncing back that you can share so I can learn more about this process? Or agencies / consultants, etc that you recommend? what other recommendations / suggestions do you have that would help reverse this 8-year-old penalty?

    | seo.owl
    0

  • I've read many threads online which proves that website speed is a ranking factor. There's a friend whose website scores 44 (slow metric score) on Google Pagespeed Insights. Despite that his website is slow, he outranks me on Google search results. It confuses me that I optimized my website for speed, but my competitor's slow site outperforms me. On Six9ja.com, I did amazing work by getting my target score which is 100 (fast metric score) on Google Pagespeed Insights. Coming to my Google search console tool, they have shown that some of my pages have average scores, while some have slow scores. Google search console tool proves me wrong that none of my pages are fast. Then where did the fast metrics went? Could it be because I added three Adsense Javascript code to all my blog posts? If so, that means that Adsense code is slowing website speed performance despite having an async tag. I tested my blog post speed and I understand that my page speed reduced by 48 due to the 3 Adsense javascript codes added to it. I got 62 (Average metric score). Now, my site speed is=100, then my page speed=62 Does this mean that Google considers page speed rather than site speed as a ranking factor? Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/YSxSwOG **Regarding: **https://six9ja.com/

    | Kingsmart
    1

  • Hi there,  Our domain Authority has dropped significantly from 26 to 19 over the last month.  This had been fairly stable over the previous 18 months. We haven't done any significant work to the website that I could point to. Does anyone have any ideas why this would happen? Any recent Google Updates that could be the cause? Regards Andy

    | andy_simpson
    1

  • Starting yesterday, Aug 26, 2020, I noticed a new bot crawling our site with user agent whatstuffwherebot. Google Analytics is counting these hits as human traffic, completely throwing off my numbers - yesterday, Analytics reported nearly triple my typical number of visitors. As of now, Search Console only shows data through Aug 25 so I don't know if Search Console is also affected. Is anybody else seeing something similar? Does anybody know what the whatstuffwherebot bot is? I don't get any results when I search on Google or Bing. For what it's worth, the traffic is coming from Columbus, OH, running over Amazon AWS via 278 different IP addresses so far. Also, WordFence (my WordPress security plugin) correctly identifies these hits as bot traffic.

    | ahirai
    0

  • I noticed that in the redirect issues I have, most of the issues are coming from our Intercom support links. I want to ask, does intercom support pages and redirect issue can affect the SEO performance of our website?

    | Envoke-Marketing
    0

  • Hi guys! There has been an unusual amount of traffic to one particular page on our blog. Now that the business is slow, I had the time to look into it. Half of that traffic is coming from India and we are a Chicago based limo service. We 'll skip why that happens part for now.
    I let Hotjar record 100 session and upon reviewing them I have noticed a lot of sessions with no interaction, no mouse movement, no clicks;  just scroll and exit. My question is related to implementing a type of verification (captcha) for that blog page to see if the bots / behavior changes.
    Are there any downside in terms of in page SEO for this type of implementation? 
    What is good practice for something like this?

    | echo1
    0

  • How to index  backlink fast on MOZ

    | mozerSL
    0

  • a:my competitors has indexed 10 pages (checked it with site:abcd.com and found 10 results) b:what if i index 20 pages of my site and create a lot of content which is also better than my competitors who will have the edge?

    | calvinkj
    0

  • The google search console revealed to me that none of my pages was indexed, all pages are listed in the 'excluded' section "duplicate, google chose different canonical than user".
    But in the URL-inspection tab it shows me google-selected canonical: N/A Indexing and crawling is both allowed. Don't know how to get my pages to be indexed correctly. (by the way, they do NOT exist in other languages, so that can't be a reason why google might think they are a duplicate. There's definitively no other version of those pages available)

    | Fibigrus
    0

  • Hi, I have a link on my www homepage to another subdomain website. Both websites are served on https, and have independent Google Analytics properties. However, the traffic from the www site to the subdomain site is being reported as Direct, and not Referral traffic. Any ideas why? See image provided for context... RCn6HER

    | RWesley
    1

  • Moz Hivemind, I'm working with an ecom beauty brand and retailer who re-platformed their website at the end of August last year. Their CTR dropped from 70% plus for branded terms to 50% over night and has steadily declined ever since, down to the low 30s as an average the last few months. Their rankings for branded terms have remained in the number 1 position, despite a slight blip at launch, which is to be expected. They admit that some new distribution deals with major retailers have added some competition to the mix, but much later in the year. I could totally understand a rankings drop and an initial hit, but has anyone seen anything like this before, is there something on the new site that could impact CTR like this, either in the SERPs or perhaps a reporting issue? As the click itself is taking place in the SERP and their rankings are solid, other than the meta description, which they swear was unchanged the first few months after launch, any ideas what could be happening here? Thanks so much.

    | Algorhythm_jT
    1

  • Hello everyone, I just build one site on WordPress and submitted it to the Google search console along with the sitemap. Some URLs got indexed but one of my URL is showing error in Search console. My post https://hotpass.site/create-subdomain-godaddy/ is showing soft error 404 webpage not available in Google search console. I have rechecked the site and seo settings. Nothing is there. I have even checked it with LIVE URL test. But still Search console is not accepting this URL.  Can anyone help me with this? Help will be appriciated.

    | Pauline21
    0

  • Hey, Moz fans. I am wondering why my AMP version shows in SERP some time and disappear again!!! there is no Error in AMP validator. Please help me. Landing: https://www.bimetime.com/blog/pasargad-life-insurance/amp

    | DivarOfficial
    0

  • For the most part in the past our company has worked on location. So filtering internal traffic was as simple as filtering out our company IPs as well as a few remote workers IPS. Now a large number of employees are working from home due to Covid-19. I am seeing an uptick in traffic that is clearly employee-related. I am hoping some of you who work with large remote teams may have some suggestions on how to best filter out traffic from remote working employees.  I found a few articles from a couple of years ago where people were using a cookie but not sure we can get that implemented in time as our Dev team is backed up. Any help is much appreciated.

    | RMATVMC
    0

  • I know I can filter sessions from outside the US, but is there a way to modify the GA script so that it doesn't cookie visitors to a site if they are from outside the US? Note, this is separate from having a cookie consent opt-in. Thanks in advance, 
    Fitz

    | FitzSWC
    0

  • Hey all, Per Search Console our branded keyword CTR is 37.8%.  But when that keyword is searched our GMB listing shows up on top of the #1 result. For the same 90 day period GMB shows another 35% visits to our GMB (based on the number of impressions and visits to our GMB page) listing when the same keyword is searched. My question is this. Does Search console data include clicks that came from our GMB listing or not? My thinking is like this: If GMB traffic is not calculated in search console then it means that 72.8% of people looking for our brand will end up on our site on way or another 9organic #1 result plus GMB listing visits) We are also doing PPC for this very keyword that has gets almost 20% of the remaining traffic.  So after adding all up we are loosing about 8% of our branded traffic to people who are doing adwords. When you search our brand you normally see 2, 3 competitor's adwords ads. Does anyone know how this works exactly? And if you don't mind sharing your branded keyword CTR's,  so I can compare to ours please. I would love to compare to a site that actually has a GMB listing ranking for the same keyword Thanks in advance, Davit

    | Davit1985
    0

  • I must be overcomplicating this. I have a website with a blog structure that includes year subfolders, so:  website.com/2019/blog-title, website.com/2018/blog-title, website.com/2017/blog-title, etc. I want to create a segment that I can apply in Site Content > All Pages to get quick stats for all blogs, regardless of year. (Pageviews, time on site, etc.) Unfortunately, Content Drilldown doesn't work well here as it is grouping by each year. I have tried setting up a segment using regex, but am getting a mixture of all pages, not just blog pages.  I have set up the segment the following way: Advanced > Conditions > Page, Matches Regex, /2019/(.*?)/ Advanced > Conditions > Page, Matches Regex, /2018/(.*?)/ Advanced > Conditions > Page, Matches Regex, /2017/(.*?)/ Am I going about this all wrong? Is my regex wrong? Any advice is appreciated! Side note: glaringly obvious that now is the time to clean up my URLs. But I'd still love to see the data in its current URL state. Thank you!

    | SoleGraphics
    0

  • I recently read Rob Beirne's piece on how and why to set up an adjusted bounce rate in Google Analytics (https://moz.com/blog/adjusted-bounce-rate). I am getting myself ready to talk to our site team about why we should set up an adjusted bounce rate and am anticipating some questions I'd like to be able to answer: 1. Will an adjusted bounce rate improve the accuracy of our avg time on page metrics? 2. Are we able to keep the unadjusted bounce rate in GA as well, so we can compare the two metrics if we ever need to? Does anyone know the answers to these questions? Any help would be much appreciated!

    | seoisfun
    0

  • Hi All,I've got a question about measuring the impact of schema. We implemented FAQ schema on a few pages such that the questions and answers written on the page are now displayed directly on the SERP.Google Search Console now provides both total page clicks and rich results clicks (under Search Appearance).  To get total clicks on the page, do you simply add up the total page and rich results clicks? Or do the rich results clicks represent interactions with the accordion, rather than a click through to the page? And if both clicks are represented differently, does that mean that the page is only sometimes being rendered on the SERP as a rich result?Any guidance would be appreciated!Thanks.

    | yaelslater
    0

  • Hello, I am not sure if i made an error. Can someone please point out. On our sales form, when a user submits the form, the URL displayed is - https://x-y.com/thank-you-2/ I created a Goal like this - 1 ) Under Goal set up, i choose Template option 2 ) Under Goal description, i choose Type > Destination 3 ) and finally, in Goal details field, destination   equals to    /thank-you-2/ But, no Goal is being tracked. In the first step, should i have selected  'Custom'  instead of 'Template' Thanks

    | Johnroger
    0

  • Hello, I am a bit confused about the correct setting of filter to combine All facebook referrals into one.
    After going through different versions, not sure which one is correct and will work Some versions say that Search string should be -  *^.facebook.com$ and Replace string should be -  facebook.com While according to other Search string should be >   *.facebook
    and Replace string should be -  facebook Please guide which one of this is correct and will work ? Thanks

    | Johnroger
    0

  • Hello MOZ Community, The website in question is https://x-y.com/ When i looked at the landing pages report in GA , x-y.com is appended at the end of every URL like this. https://x-y.com/x-y.com When i open the above URL in GA interface, it shows page not found. This is obvious as there is no such URL.
    The metrics like sessions, Users, Bounce rate all look good. In the property settings, The default URL is written like this http:// cell-gate.com (Please note that s is missing in property settings). But how is traffic tracked correctly How do i solve this problem. What settings should we change to make the landing pages report look ok Thanks

    | Johnroger
    0

  • Hey Mozzers, I'm seeing more 'New users' than 'Users' in Google Analytics (see screenshot). This is over a 3 year time period. Any idea why new users would be greater than users? Thanks! 6lYmU0j

    | RWesley
    0

  • All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events. The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs. What are best practices in this area? To index or not? What do you / your clients do and why? Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)

    | hlwebdev
    1

  • We have a newspaper source that links to a domain that forwards to a page on our website. Do we get link juice from that? Go here: https://dailygazette.com/  click on "Classifieds" then "CapRegion Homes" the button goes to the website www.capregionhomes.com which forwards to our main website, a page we built for them. My question is: Because the link from this site first goes to another site that auto-forwards to us are we actually getting any link juice from the daily gazette on this or is that first site getting all the juice & we technically are getting link juice from capregionhomes.com ?

    | Cfarcher
    0

  • Because of the tools my company is using for CI/CD (A CI/CD pipeline helps you automate steps in your software delivery process, such as initiating code builds, running automated tests, and deploying to a staging or production environment.) an extra URL is generated. The canonical for the generated site is that of our main website, but other than that it is the same website. Could this new URL compete with our website? Will Google count it against us since it is the same content BUT with canonical (it is not noindex-ed)? Does it matter? Surely others are using this method? Answers/thoughts will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

    | RoxBrock
    0

  • I have a multitude of "schedule a demo" pages/forms on my site that are all identical, so I have on all of them.  My question is, should I also place on the link to the "schedule a demo" pages? I know the generic rule is to never nofollow any internal links (per Matt Cutts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY), but should that still apply if the link directs to a page that is noindex, nofollow? Thanks for your input in advance; don't want to run into, as Matt Cutts puts it, "a mini kerfuffle!"

    | BethA
    0

  • I'm working with a client that has a number of paths for users to take (demand vs. supply, a lot of variables, etc). All involve new URLs and are perfect for destination-based goals and thus the creation of funnels; however, right now most are irrelevant due to some issues involving redirects, changed paths, etc. In the process of trying to make sense of them, I discovered that the site forces you to make an account before proceeding through the steps in the funnel. Are there any resources that might indicate the best to approach situations like this - that is, account creation at the beginning (and as a requirement before proceeding) to creating an account at the end? I'm trying to make sense of all their potential paths, but it's impossible without making countless accounts. Thanks.

    | Alces
    0

  • We think we get link equity from some large travel domains to white label versions of our main website. These pages are noindex because they're the same URLs and content as our main B2C website and have canonicals to the pages we want indexed. Question is, is there REALLY link equity to pages on our domain which have "noindex,nofollow" on them? Secondly we're looking to put all these white label pages on a separate structure, to better protect our main indexed pages from duplicate content risks. The best bet would be to put them on a sub folder rather than a subdomain, yes? That way, even though the pages are still noindex, we'd get link equity from these big domains to www.ourdomain.com/subfolder where we wouldn't to subdomain.ourdomain.com? Thank you!

    | HTXSEO
    0

  • hi guys i have a Keyword Cannibalization isuue, please Introduce best free tools for  checking Keyword Cannibalization.

    | 1001mp3
    0

  • Hi mozzers, We just learned that our standard GA hasn't been as reliable as we hoped so and we are trying to find other ways to track organic sessions. Which solution would you consider? Is Segment one of them? If so, is it more reliable than Google Analytics? Thanks

    | Ty1986
    1

  • I'm having confusion about where I would add the the Enhanced Ecommerce line of code: ga(‘require’, ‘ec’); if I have Analytics implemented through Google Tag Manager? I have read through several articles and still am not entirely sure.

    | SearchStan
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, Under Mobile Usability, in Google Search Console, I am seeing very few website pages getting analysed - 10 out of 40 static pages, on the website in question. Is this to be expected or does this indicated an indexing problem on mobile?

    | McTaggart
    0

  • I've just taken on a new client and on first look at their Google Analytics they are getting a bounce rate between 7% and 0%. Frankly I'm amazed if this is correct as between 1 April 2017 and 21 June 2017 they've driven 6403 session to the site from a range of referrers as well as AdWords (which has a 0% bounce rate), so traffic is pretty good. I've never seen such a low bounce rate which is making me suspicious, what can I do to check it's all recording properly? Any other ideas or have I found a near perfect site in terms of bounce? The url is http://knuma.co.uk/

    | Marketing_Optimist
    1

  • When I search my keyword on google I can see my website, but when I connect to a VPN and again search it, I'm not in the search result, what happens on my website?

    | Pintapin
    0

  • This week we did two big email sends from completely separate sources and separate lists. However, in GA I see spam traffic coming from the same city and the same service provider when I look at the report for each source. Screenshots attached. I'm hoping someone can help me understand what I'm looking at and what I should do in the future to prevent. Thanks! g9NTZ5z X5WhYnf

    | eGInnovations
    0

  • Hello, When I want to "Explore by site" and make a "Site overview", I have only 4 choices for the region : USA United Kingdom Canada Australia But the location of my business is in Chile.
    Does this have any repercussion or negative impact in the analytics ? Thank you.

    | Sodimaccl
    0

  • We are a electronic hardware manufacture with a fairly large catalog of products.  I dynamically built our site and we have over 705,000 unique products that we can offer.  With our php framework I was able to create sitemaps that hold every product unique url.  After doing all of that I submitted our data to Google. Then waited with a cocktail encouraged that we'd grow up the ranks of Google organically.  Well, that didn't happen. Besides several other problems (lack of overall unique content, appearance of duplicate content, no meta description, no unique page titles, poor use of heading tags and no rel canonical tags) how can I get a "do-over" with Google and my submitted sitemaps?  Can they be re-submitted?  Can they even be deleted?

    | jandk4014
    0

  • Search Console is giving this issue for near 100 pages of my website. I have checked the Yoast plugin settings. We haven't used any meta robots tag for these pages, neither have these pages been disallowed in robots.txt. Previosuly this issue was for some 20+ pages. I tried to reindex them by submitting the urls again. Now the count has risen to 100+. There is also this "Submitted URL blocked by robots.txt" issue for pages which are NOT disallowed in robots.txt. Can anyone please suggest me a solution here?

    | Reema24
    0

  • As marketing agency we have for each client an analytics account. This means that we have more than 100 analytics accounts. Because there is a limit of 100 analytics accounts (free version), we have created multiple accounts that own different analytics accounts of our clients. Is it possible to use x@conversal.be and add it to each of our multiple analytics accounts as manager or is there a limit too? In other words, how many accounts can you manage as 'manager'?

    | conversal
    1

  • We noticed a huge spike in traffic this past Sunday and after some digging in our Analytics account, we saw that it was coming from kazooisyee (under the Network tab). This traffic had almost a 100% bounce rate and they spent an average of less than a second on our site. Does anyone know what this might be associated to? Is this one of those SEO site analysis sites? Any information on this will help a ton as my employer is rather concerned about this at the moment. Thanks!

    | Justine.Hedge
    0

  • For the last 4 hours of so we were registering zero users and Adsense reporting has not changed. We checked the site, and there were no problems. It seems for some reason there was no reporting. Just now it came back up and we are showing live traffic. Trying to figure out if this was a problem specific to us or if it is on Google's end. Thanks,

    | akin67
    0

  • Hi, I'm getting these weird phantom search results showing up in my analytics account which is skewing  my results. I have a wordpress site, and I do have some custom search results pages, but analytics is telling me these hits are coming from google- which I doubt. The end of the query string (&cat=plus-5-results) is not coming from a link created within my site. Anyone have any ideas? Failing that, would somebody be kind enough to explain how I can ignore these hits, but retain other, valid search result requests? Thanks reading! Will Screenshot%202019-05-16%20at%2022.32.10.jpg

    | madegood
    0

  • I am noticing a decline in the number of our linking domains and inbound links from month to month. It isn't drastic but looking like a trend. Any reason why this would happen? I'm not sure where to start. Thanks!

    | amanda_feagle
    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.