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.


  • Moz Analytics and Google analytics is saying some keywords are driving organic search traffic & hence MA suggesting them as keyword opportunities, yet theres no rank for any of them so how can that be so ? cheers dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • My client has recently had his site rewritten by a company which supplies a website/hosting/seo service.  The client still wants to use me for establishing his site locally and for SEM.  My problem is that the code is not accessible to me.  They have set up GA tracking which feeds into the reports dashboard.  There is no way of actually access the raw data. When I asked for access to the GA account I got this message from bOline solutions: "Your SEO consultant will need to create a new GA account and then add the meta tag to the reports tab of your site" Because I am still very much learning GA I do not know what meta tag they are referring too.  I'm therefore stuck as to how to create it.  I've started learning about "Google Tag Manager" and am working through "Digital Analytics Fundementals",  I've a feeling this is just a question of terminology - can anyone more experience in the subject help me?

    | catherine-279388
    0

  • I have a brand new site with a paid search referral in my G&A, but we are not running any adwords or any paid marketing for it. The referral is "not set" so I do not know where it is coming from.

    | KJ-Rodgers
    0

  • I am working on a project to measure offline conversions with the new Universal Analytics from Google. When a lead gets the status "order" in my custom made lead management system, we sent the earlier grabbed Google client ID with the code below to Universal Analytics. The upload is working, although Analytics reports the conversion as an e-commerce transaction. I think the conversion must be uploaded as a analytics goal / event but I don't know what we can add to the code to let Analytics report it that way. Does anyone know how I can modify the code or Analytics settings to make sure that Google Analytics does not report it as eCommerce transaction? My code for uploading the Google Client ID to Analytics: <code>$ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.google-analytics.com/collect'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "v=1&tid=UA-XXXXXXXX-42&cid=379445656".urlencode('.')."1380816256&t=transaction&tr=123.00&ti=43388&z=".time()); curl_close ($ch);</code>

    | timvermeulen639
    0

  • Hi there, I know Google has been encrypting SEO keyword data which they rolled out in September 2013.  My question is - will this impact SEO revenue figures reported in Google analytics? I have been monitoring SEO revenue figures for a client and they are significantly down even though rankings have not lowered.  Is this because of Google's encryption? Could there be another reason? Many thanks!

    | CayenneRed89
    0

  • In both the new GA and former version, how are RSS feeds handled by Google Analytics. If not, is there an easy means by which to account for this traffic, in order to have a better picture of traffic. Thanks. Alan

    | ahw
    0

  • Hi, I'm having problems finding where to set up a new view in Analytics. I have seen https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009714?hl=en but get lost at point 3 (In the View column, click the menu, then click Create new view.) In the menu there is no option that I can see. If I go into the one view that is set up, I also can't see anything 'View Settings' that would allow me to copy the view and then modify it. Am I missing something? Thanks

    | Houses
    0

  • We are trying to get the keyword count of a particular keyword from a particular country to a particular page. eg: (keyword)Green shoes from (country)United states on (particular page)one of our blog posts page Any help will be really appreciated

    | Nobody1587050174582
    0

  • Moz reports two links to the same Home page ad duplicate titles ... http://myhjhome.com/index.php
    http://myhjhome.com I'm not sure if I should just 301 redirect http://myhjhome.com/index.php to http://myhjhome.com, or if there is a better way to handle that? Or should I comb the website and make sure all links to the Home page dont include index.php? Just looking for some extra help here, learning as I'm going, thanks!!

    | ElykInnovation
    0

  • Last summer we setup another Google Analytics property for us with Universal Analytics and have been running this alongside the old Google Analtyics property. is there a way of exporting all the old data from the old property into the new Universal Analytics property?

    | ese
    0

  • Hi Im looking at the content viewed in December for a clients site and there's a high number of page views for some non-existent pages which received multiple hits eg. domain.com/dr-capability/ with 241 page views (54 unique page views) How can you have multiple page views (and many unique page views) for pages that don't exist ? Is it possible page is being generated automatically or something ? if so how come ? Any ideas as to whats causing this much appreciated ? All Best Dan ps - also many above average home page views

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • For longer tail keywords with typical local monthly search volume of 50 or so, there are exact match domains that are just killing it.  Take for instance "alabama registered agent", I'm showing www.alabamaregisteredagent.com in the first spot ahead of the state department, etc.  This site has zero links in OSE (DA and PA 1) and is a very small site in general.  Can anyone explain why this domain is doing so well?

    | Harbor_Compliance
    0

  • In the interest of determining why our ecommerce site isn't converting, I've been spending some quality time with GA.  I've suspected that our front page is part of the problem, especially where our organic traffic is concerned (we get a good deal of referral traffic from a link on an OEM's site). According to the Behavior Flow report under the Behavior section of GA, organic traffic to our home page is hemorrhaging (roughly 60% bounce rate).  But when I went to the All Pages report (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages) and looked at organic traffic to our home page, then looked at the Medium as a secondary dimension, I'm getting a bounce rate of 35%.  Why the massive discrepancy?  Can somebody assist?

    | ufmedia
    0

  • My situation is rather complicated , I have 5 domains with different but identical services. Some with good traffic some without, but 2 main domains have manual penalty from Google (I have tried a lot to get rid of the penalty but no success) so finally I have decided to move all our websites under one anchor website 'a brand' and pass all the seo juice + blog articles under the same. Now the problem with the procedure is that we cannot redirect the penalized domain urls to new one as penalization will also be transferred and the whole motive of creating a new brand will be lost. So if somebody could guide me as of how I should proceed transferring SEO value with minimum traffic loss but without using 301) **One way I could figure out is using canonical (Am not confident over it) but say I create 5 identical pages on new domain and declare them as canonical of old domain pages (So is it safe? will it transfer the penalty of old domain to canonical new urls? ) ** Rest i am bifurcating all the traffic sources like direct / organic / referral / Social etc and chalking out what we can control manually and in what ratio, gradually I will work on each section to transfer the traffic. Main Problem is of Organic and Not available. Some suggestions or blog urls would be appreciated.

    | ngupta1
    0

  • Hello, I have my landing pages located on a separated subdomain (LP.example.com). I've created a new property in Google Analytics for that subdomain. My question is: where do I have to place the GA tracking code ? in the header ? before I close the tag or before I close the tag ? I have another issue: I've placed the GA Tracking code on some pages in the way below:
    in the body tag of that Landing page HTML Code I added this line:

    | JonsonSwartz
    0

  • I have generated a .xml sitemap of the site www.ihc.co.uk. The sitemap generated seems all fine, however when submitting to webmaster tools, it is returning a 404 error? anyone experienced this before. deleted and re-done the process. Tried different xml sitemap generators and even cleared cache along the way.

    | dentaldesign
    0

  • Dear Community In early October, I noticed a sharp drop of the rankings of the main KW of a website I manage: idee-sol.fr. This, of course I immediatelly attributed to penguin 2.1. While researching on the experience other webmasters have had with this unfortunate situation, I noticed that most of them had very sharp drops of traffic in a relatively small time, e.g.: a drop of 80% in a couple of days. But on idee-sol, the drop looks less steep yet equally worrying. Was the cause of this traffic/ranking drop due to penguin 2.1 exclusively or to penguin + something else (or not penguin at all?) I'm including an image of the "non paid search" report of analytics. dPnphnr

    | Masoko-T
    0

  • Updated website from Magento backend to Wordpress and since the redeploy, my bounce rate has dropped from 40% to 4%. I did check to see if there was duplicate GA tracking code but only one call. I checked reports under "visitor flow" and one page visits seem inline with the previous bounce rate. Weird. Never experienced this before.

    | Timmmmy
    0

  • Hello, May last year my site took a major fall. I am unsure why, and it's time I found out why. Recently I have rebuilt the site from scratch, except for the urls and content, and it's starting to turn back. What is the best method to go about understanding just what caused the decline? What are the options I have? See the image for a graph of the all-time traffic.  http://i.imgur.com/uL93yPj.png My website in question is: www.ditalia.com.au Thanks. uL93yPj.png

    | infinart
    0

  • I'm getting quite a few 'Duplicate Title Error' on category pages which span over 2 - 3 pages. E.g. http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches?page=1 http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches?page=2 http://www.partwell.com/cutting-punches?page=3 All 4 pages currently have the same title... <title>Steel Cutting Punches</title> I was thinking of adding Page Numbers to the title of each corresponding page, thus making them all unique and clearing the Duplicate Page Title errors. E.g. <title>Steel Cutting Punches</title> <title>Steel Cutting Punches | Page 1 of 3</title> <title>Steel Cutting Punches | Page 2 of 3</title> <title>Steel Cutting Punches | Page 3 of 3</title> Is this the best way to go around it? Or is there another way that I'm not thinking of? Would I need to use the rel=canonical tag to show that the original page is the one I want to be found? Thanks

    | bricktech
    0

  • Hi What are people's views on using the Technology > Network > Service provider part of Google Analytics as a way to find companies that have visited a website? Then potentially contact them companies etc? Thanks

    | Hughescov
    0

  • I've noticed a few of our sites (tour, hotel, and local attraction) which are very established and reasonably high brand recognition that have experienced a significant decrease in branded traffic (-20-30% compared to same period from the previous year) the past few months. There have been no changes in offline marketing though we are seeing a slight decrease in visitor arrivals (-5%) and higher hotel room rates. Is there a chance that Google's not set may be affecting direct traffic numbers? Any other thoughts on how we can figure out why brand traffic is dipping? Thanks

    | SoulSurfer8
    0

  • Hi, Anyone know of a good GA plug in for Excel?

    | S_Curtis
    0

  • For one of our keywords, i have 2,500 impressions this past month, but there were only 1,300 queries according to Google's keyword planner. How can I have more impressions than queries? If anything, I thought it would be the other way around. If someone could flush this out for me, I'd be incredibly grateful. Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • We have a client that would like to do some direct mail marketing and the plan is to use a short/simple domain in the marketing materials, which redirects to the main site domain. By default this would show as a referral traffic source in Analytics, right? So any traffic that came through that redirect would be attributed to "shortdomain.com / referral"? Meaning I wouldn't need to do any sort of customized, advanced tracking set up to track conversions that I've already set up (ecomm and goals) and attribute them to this new source? Just double checking that I'm not overlooking something. Thanks!

    | VTDesignWorks
    0

  • This is really puzzling me and my research has not thrown out the answer. I have always understood URL goals to be unique pageviews of the thank you page you are tracking. UPVs and goals should both only be counted once per session... Has anyone else seen this issue? Goals were not set up historically so I wanted to use unique pageviews of the thank you page for year on year comparisons, but 20% is a big difference! Background There are multiple pages to track so goal is set up using Regex There is no mistake in the goal set up (honest!) The goal URLs all match the unique pageview URLs, there are no rogue URLs There has been no change to the site or the tracking set up Data is not being sampled It's a lead gen site in an area where multiple enquiries within one visit would be very unusual Thanks in advance!

    | McCannSEO
    0

  • Hello, Google is displaying (not provided) for signed in users. Is there any workaround for this ? Any advanced segment by which can know more about such traffic ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Hi I am putting in to Google: site:www.mysite.com to see the pages listed on Google - the figure Google is coming back with is much lower than the actual pages, I have no crawer warning etc... What could the problem be? Thanks

    | acumenadagency
    0

  • Hey - how's things? I've got 2 goals setup, each of which use the same thank you page but with different required funnels. The results have been identical for the last few weeks - which tells me I've got something wrong!! The first goal has a contact form on every page in the /products/ directory set up like this:
    destination equal to: /thanks-enquiry/funnel step1 page: ^/products/.*   required: yes The first goal has a form on 1 page called /on-sale set up like this:
    destination equal to: /thanks-enquiry/
    funnel step1 page: /on-sale   required: yes Any ideas?

    | agua
    0

  • I put the e-commerce tracking code on the transaction platform (Regnow) finishing page, but all the orders displayed in GA can't tell the real order source. Instead, most of orders are from direct(none), and referrals from my site. So this is obviously wrong. I need the accurate order source such as google organic or google ppc, then I can find which keyword brings me orders. After some searches, I guess the reason is cookie domain. My GA is set as single domain tracking. And I didn't put any cookie domain code on the Regnow's transaction finishing page. The codes I put on the page are: So, suppose my site is "www.example.com". How to make sure I can track the real order source on the Regnow's transaction finishing page? Should I set my GA to track multi top-level domains, and put _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '']); code on the tracking page? How to set the domain name, "none" or "example.com"?? Thanks in advance.

    | JonnyGreenwood
    0

  • Hello guys,
    I have a website with around 600-650 visitor a day.
    Can i know trough Google analytics the most busy time in the day ? Thank you

    | WayneRooney
    0

  • Just a quickie.... I know that this was possible in the previous incarnation of Google Analytics, but I cant fathom how to do to it now on the most recent version. How can I see when the mos popular visitor times were on my website? I.e. a graph that shows a 24 hour clock over any given time frame

    | DHS_SH
    0

  • Hi, I may be going mad, but i can't find the code to activate demographics and interest reports if you are using the new analytics code. I can only find the code adjust for the old code. Any one know where to find this? Thanks Paul

    | eminent
    0

  • Hey, How can i set up multiple proxy server for Advanced Web Ranking? I managed to block everyone from Google the last time I used this 😕 Thanks, Luke.

    | NoisyLittleMonkey
    0

  • This keeps coming up in some of our top Referrals on our website in Analytics. Does anyone know what it is? We have tried researching it and have had not luck. http://vizedhtmlcontent.next.ecollege.com/

    | TracSoft
    0

  • Hi mozzers, I have a little riddle. A few weeks ago the bounce rate on one of our website dropped 90% - from 45 % average to 5 % average. We haven't changed much in the code of the site, layout or anything else. The traffic is pretty stable too. Anyone can guess why? Or have experienced something similar? xOvrb.jpg

    | ThomasHgenhaven
    0

  • I want to see in Google Analytics whether or not people are viewing my website on a TV, such as with a smart TV or other device connected to their TV. These are the only ways to do this that I have found so far: Operating system: Google TV, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox Browser: Nintendo Browser, Playstation 3 Are there other data points that I can reliably use to segment these users?

    | RCF
    0

  • I want to filter out direct traffic from the service provider msn. For some reason they are crawling our traffic and its throwing off my data. So I want to exclude direct, but only from msn. Would I set my first filter for direct then msn or vice versa? Thanks

    | EcommerceSite
    0

  • I have two sites: a blog and an ecommerce site. The blog funnels people to the ecommerce site. In Analytics I'm seeing declines in referral traffic from the blog to the ecommerce site. During the same time I'm seeing an increase in campaign traffic to the ecommerce site, with most campaign traffic coming from the blog. I believe the increase in campaign traffic is largely a result of simply having installed more tracking links. This leads me to believe that the declines I'm seeing in referral traffic is simply a result of the increase in campaign traffic. In other words, what was once counted and reported as being referral traffic is now being counted and reported as campaign traffic. So my question is this: In Google Analytics is campaign traffic ALSO reported as referral traffic, or is campaign traffic reported separately and not duplicated in referral traffic reports? I'll provide a concrete example to make this more clear in case it isn't: Say site X sends 1000 visits each month to site Y. Say 50 of those visits come from a single link on X. If that link is changed so that campaign Z data info added (via the Google URL Builder), would you expect to then see 950 referral visits each month from site X to site Y plus 50 campaign visits to site Y via new campaign Z, or would you continue to see 1000 referral visits plus the new 50 campaign visits? Many thanks in advance to anyone that can shed some light on this.

    | aaronprimal
    0

  • I've noticed something a little odd in my organic search traffic lately.  Looking at several websites that target the Minneapolis area, I'm seeing some organic searches come in (typically using head keywords - no geo-modifier) from Mountain View, CA.  There's no way we are truly ranking well on these terms in California, so it certainly feels like Google sniffing around.  I was worried that perhaps they were checking into penalizing us or something, but we've actually seen upticks in search traffic lately.  This traffic is not showing up in Google Analytics, just Adobe SiteCatalyst.  In the past, spikes from random locations were probably some sort of crawler, like the preview bot, but these are coming in as searches with (for now) keyword data. Has anyone else seen anything like this?

    | SarahLK
    0

  • Hello guys, We are currently getting in our website around 600 daily visitors.
    We getting around the 50 quotes a day.
    Can i know trough Analytics  from where all the visitors that click the quote button coming from ? Thank you

    | WayneRooney
    0

  • I would like to setup my form's conversion rate as a goal in my Google Analytics account. The goal is complete when someone enters their information and hits submit. Logically, the "Thank you page" would be the destination url for the goal. My problem is that the thank you page is outside of the primary domain, for example, my site is: SiteExampl.com but the Thank you URL is thankyouurl.com Is it possible to setup a goal like this? If so how. Thanks in advance!

    | christinarule
    0

  • Hi I would like some assistance / clarification on how to set up a user segment so that it can track user behavior over multiple visits. Basically I have a campaign set up and want to see conversions - even if they hit the site and then convert later on another visit. I've read that you can do this (over up to 30 days). So I start off by filtering TRAFFIC SOURCE - easy enough. But then I have to add under "advanced" correct? But then when I set the next filter to the GOAL I want, I only get "by session" and "by hit" as options. The blog post I read made it sound like only "by user" would then really do multi visits. Is "by user" only an e-commerce tracking option? (which I don't have set up) Is there another way/path to get the info I need? Thank you!

    | yandl
    0

  • Hi, Is there a problem or a general recommendation about using the same gmail account for two different sites (both in Google Analytics and Webmaster tools)? Thanks

    | BeytzNet
    0

  • I have a client that changed from MoveableType to Wordpress. He also changed from a dedicated server to WP Engine. He may have blocked search engines for a week or two, so his organic traffic is down but only by 25%. He's 301 redirecting all of the old pages. The mystery is that his referral traffic from Google is down 90%. It's a popular blog, so that's thousands. It's been going on a month now. Anyone seen this before?

    | Hyper-Dog
    0

  • Hi, I am looking for a podcast service or plugin (for wordpress) but with some analytics! 
    I work for video with wistia and I am looking for something similar for my podcasts. Do you have any idea about it? The only I found is http://www.podbean.com/ Thanks!

    | petrospan
    0

  • In February, I transferred an HTML site to a WordPress Platform. Since then, Direct traffic has spiked to nearly 400% since the WordPress transition. The Direct traffic spike took roughly 2 months before it started to kick in. Does anyone know what this could be attributed to?

    | SteveZero12
    0

  • I recently switched our company's website over to Wordpress in February. Organic traffic went down.... http://www.screencast.com/t/dJ0Oeyma5Xs Same content, there are a few different page URLs but most of all it is all the same and I've SEO'd it to pieces. Any thoughts? I can't figure this one out.

    | SteveZero12
    0

  • I have created separate google webmaster access for this sub folder http://lineonebus.com/content/ Original domain http://lineonebus.com/ Search results in webmaster shows no search queries though this subfolder created in wordpress is ranking for some keywords.

    | csfarnsworth
    1

  • The attached graph is from google analytics, a correlation of about 14 months of Organic Google visits with algo changes, data from moz naturally 🙂 Is there any way to tell from this which will have affected the site? for example #1 or #2 seems to be responsible for the first dip, but #4 seems to fix it and it broke around 6, or is the rise between 4 and 7 an anomaly and actually 1 or 2 caused a slip from when it was released all the way to when 7 was released. Sorry if the graph is a little cloak and dagger, that is partly because we don't have permissions to reveal much about the identity, and partly because we were trying to do a kind of double blind, separating the data from our biases 🙂 We can say though the different between the level at the start and end of the graph is at least 10,000 visits per day JarMzoK.png

    | Fammy
    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.