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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.


  • When using GA on my Website do I need to have a disclaimer that 'We are using Google Analtyic to Track information'?

    | daracreative
    0

  • I am a huge fan of WBF and I saw the one about anchor text diversity, and although it helped answer a lot of questions it definitely raised a few more. So how does anchor text diversity relate to the timing of it all? If for instance there is a site that already has thousands of links for related terms to the keyword "oranges", would it be ok to now JUST build links with the exact anchor text "oranges"? or would the site still have to build links to both related terms and the exact match? So to clarify, i guess my question is, when Google looks at anchor text diversity and % of partial keyword match, is it looking at all the links to the page as a whole or is it looking at the links as they come? And what is the % of exact anchor text that is healthy? I am thinking that 10% exact match and the rest should be partial match. Am i off? Is there a better ratio? Thanks in advance -Vaibhav Methuku

    | vaibhavm1
    0

  • On one of my campaigns the ranking in SEOMoz for a search term at Google UK is 34, but when I run an analysis using different software it gives a ranking of 8. Search the term on Google and 8 is correct, not 34. Why should this be?

    | Beemer
    0

  • So I have a site that was getting about 200 hits (not a lot). They came to me and asked to do SEO. There were over 50 pages in HTML format so I created header/footers and changed the .html pages to .php. I set forwards up in the htaccess and everything. I did everything that I was suppose to. Now when I go to the analytics it almost looks like it lost all it's traffic from the keywords it was ranked in. Any ideas on why?

    | blackrino
    0

  • Hey people, I'm sure many of you applied changes to the URL structure of a client's or your own website before. So did I for obvious reason: The structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html. 
    Edit: Also on-page it was optimized, but only taking out worthless links like "keyword-link to other page" and adding a relevant SEO text (also valuable for the user) Now, for the targeted short-tail keyword, the outcome was great - ranking increased by 17 landing the page on the first SERP. But: Before this page garnered a wide range of long-tail keyword traffic.To be exact: 2600 different keywords generated traffic for that page in a period of 1 month. Now the newly structured site (also on-page optimized) only receives traffic from around 100 keywords. You can imagine that the absolute amount of visits also dropped. So I'd like to know if you observed similar results. Another question that's coming up in this context: How regularly does Google refresh the keywords associated with a page? Like: Is this page really relevant for this one keyword we associated it with 5 years ago? Because it is clear, when I'm looking at the aforementioned 2600 KW in detail, most don't have anything to do with the site, i.e. are not mentioned at all. Still they generated valuable traffic though. All of this is really crucial to this project, because soon the whole website's supposed to be relaunched with optimized URL structure and of course everything else that's need SEO wise... I'd love to hear your experiences. Thanks!!

    | dumperama
    0

  • Good afternoon. I have a question.
    I have a main site site.com + many subdomains example1.site.com, example2.site.com, example3.site.com, example4.site.com .... I need to combine google Analytics reports into one. Information from: example2.site.com, example3.site.com
    showed in example1.site.com Yk64j

    | meteorr
    0

  • Hi Guys can anyone point me in the right direction. My funnels used to work fine until our app team decided to add variables in a directory structure instead of a query string. I need to be able to track page steps that now look like this Step 1 = /Reservation/Search/Var1/Var2
    Step 2 = /Reservation/Quote/Var1/Var2 I've set up this but it's not working Step 1 = /Reservation/Search.*
    Step 2 = /Reservation/Quote.* What am I doing wrong?

    | apolloseo
    0

  • The full announcement is here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html My concern is that the ability for Google Analytics to parse information on specific keyword queries will be diminished. The article hints that Google Webmaster Tools will be exempt from the problem, and I've never relied on Webmaster tools as a go-to for tying specific keyword queries to Goal Tracking (form submissions and sales). The community's thoughts on this one are appreciated. 🙂

    | MKR_Agency
    0

  • Hello, I was reviewing my PRO member campaign report. I see that I am getting warnings for too long of URLs. However, these URLs are my website URL with the Google URL builder tracking code that I set up for my marketing campaings. Why are these being indexed? For example: www.website.com/?utm_source=Oct+Newsletter&utm_medium=e.... Thank you, Kristen

    | KLFeichtner
    0

  • We have 3 websites. USA, Germany and UK. Currently our analytics account is set up with 1 account with each domain as a Profile. I am wondering if I would see more accurate results if I have them set up individually, under the same Google account, but different Analytic accounts. The reason I wonder is because I noticed when I was going through setting this up, it asked for each Country Time Zone for each domain. I was not sure if this was for me to see the times, or if this was to provide more accurate data. Maybe this is just a personal preference topic?

    | hfranz
    0

  • Hi, The page in question is: http://www.toymart.com/details.php?id=1764 The problem is that this and most of the other 10,000 pages used to rank well but now are really struggling.
    I am begining to suspect that I have some sort of Google penalty but I cannot know for sure.
    I believe I comply with all Google guidelines and I think the SEO is good.
    Possibly the eBay affiliate links are the problem but they form a large part of the content and user experience.
    The page gives a price guide for items in different conditions and has various other tools for the user. Any thought would be appreciated. Thanks for your time in advance. Alan

    | ToyMart3
    0

  • When I ran the SEO Moz report it says that I have a ton of duplicate content. The first one I looked at was my home page. http://www.kisswedding.com/ http://www.kisswedding.com/index.html http://kisswedding.com/index.html All of the above 3 have varying internal links, page authority, and link root domains. Only the first has any external links. All of the others only seem to have 1 other duplicate page. It's a difference between the www and the non-www version. I have a verified acct for www.kisswedding.com in google webmaster tools. The non-www version is in there too but has not been verified. Under settings for the verified account (www.kisswedding.com), "Don't set a preferred domain" is checked off. Is that my mistake. And if so, which should I select? The www version or the non-www version? Thanks!

    | annasus
    0

  • Majestic SEO and even yahoo sitemap see's it... why not SEOMOZ? The website is a few months old already. www.lackofsleephq.com

    | sleepmaster
    0

  • I added Goals to my Google Analytics tracking. It's working; I get visitors who have completed Goals showing up in the reporting. My question is: Is it possible to trace backwards from a completed Goal to the original search phrase a user entered in Google to come to my site (for those who entered from Google.com via organic search result)? I'm trying to answer the question of which search phrases are resulting in completed Goals (as opposed to bouncing off the site or just any behaviour other than completing a Goal). It seems like this should be one of Analytics' default reports -- help identify which search phrases are converting well. It's probably there and I'm just not seeing it... Thanks.

    | scanlin
    0

  • could anyone explain the difference between Page Authority and Domain Authoity to me or give me a link to a site where it is explained? Sorry if It's really obvious and I'm just too stupid to find out, but I've searched and haven't found anything.

    | mtueckcr
    0

  • Hello Friends, thank you for helping in advance. My website http://www.FrontlineMobility.com gets a lot of traffic and with our Google Adwords campaigns we have very good click through rates(percentages from 1 percent to 4 percent). So I know that I am getting people to my site, but I can't get them to spend money. It seems like they get there ready to buy, but something turns them away at the last moment. My Partner feels like we should put more pictures of people on the site so that people feel like there is a face to our company. I am also in agreement with this, but I would also like to know if anything else is wrong with our site that perhaps maybe another set of eyes could perceive. Thank you again Moz friends. Justin Smith Frontline Mobility

    | FrontlineMobility
    0

  • I would like to optimize my clients blog. If I am using their GA account for their over all website but put in the sub folder for SEOMOz, will it detect that I only want to optimize the blog ex. http://xxx.com/blog or will I be seeing the GA for the entire site on SEOMOZ?

    | CliffordC
    0

  • I recently identified an issue with our site whereby we had three different URL types for each article. As an example, we might have something like: /articles/my-article-name /articles/my-article-name.aspx /articles/My-Article-Name We've since taken action to address this by implement 301 redirects from the second and third formats to the first (so everything is without the .aspx extension and is in lower case). But the results have been disconcerting. Before the change, one of our articles receives 150 or so hits per day via the .aspx version. The other two existed but had very low traffic (1-3 per day). We decided the non .aspx and lowercase version was the version we wanted. Sure enough, when we introduced the 301 redirects on September 25th the traffic for the .aspx version just stopped (after a day) and the traffic for the non-.aspx version climbed. But not enough. After the change, the non-.aspx version is receiving about 60-70% of the traffic that we used to have on the .aspx version. So, instead of receiving 150 per day (to the .aspx version) we are receiving around 100 or so to the non-.aspx version. This pattern has occured across all our articles and, as a result, our site-wide traffic has dropped by about 40% or so. Since we are using 301 redirects I had assumed that the search engines would just update to reflect the non-.aspx version. I am sure I am missing something here. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks. Mark

    | MarkWill
    0

  • GWT says that a large popular site with DA 70 has a link to one of our recently published pages.  Is it possible to find the location of that link using GWT?  I don't think the SEOmoz tools can find it, perhaps because our page is too new. Best,
    Christopher

    | ChristopherGlaeser
    0

  • Has anyone who uses SEOBook Rankcheck in Firefox (version 7) had problems with the tool picking up rankings for Bing, but not Google?  I've got keywords that I know I rank in the top 10 (and my Raven account confirms it), but when I run a report on Rank Checker, those same words aren't ranking; instead I just get a "-".  I've tried restarting my computer and emptying my cookies; but no luck. Any thoughts?

    | EricVallee34
    0

  • I'm getting unusual swings in SERPS ranks from one day to another (I had several keywords ranked in top ten go to the the third or fourth page in a week). I knwo that there's always variation because of localized and custom search, but this seems to be something more.

    | bbelgard
    0

  • I want to use the Google Analytics landing page reports to look at the bounce rate of top level pages excluding the homepage. So pages with urls: www.example.com/example Does anyone know a regular expression that will allow me to do this? Just to clarify I do not want to look at the bounce rate of the homepage or any pages deeper than www.example.com/example e.g: www.example.com/example/example www.example.com/example/example/example etc Thanks in advance

    | CPLDistribution
    0

  • I setup LivePerson web chat on my site.  In doing so I integrated it with Google Analytics as a conversion goal so I can track the visitors that engaged in chat. I want to see the affect these chats have on my other conversion goal, a completed lead.  How do I figure out the conversion % of new leads for people who have enaged in web chat vs. those who haven't?

    | TheDude
    0

  • Hi, So after reading a few posts here I  have realised it a big deal to crawl the web and index all the links. For that I appreciate seomoz.org's efforts . I was wondering what kind of infrastructure they might need to get this done ? cheers, Vishal

    | vishalkhialani
    0

  • So I noticed today that there is now Real Time Data: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.html and I cannot figure out how to access this.

    | joseph.chambers
    1

  • I notice in the OSE Link Metrics the reporting of Social Shares. The total shares do not include the Facebook Likes. What I'm wondering is what does this mean? Do Shares count more than Likes? Are Likes not counted by Google. What about LinkedIn Shares, why are they not being reported on? If Google is now putting more emphasis on Social where is the best use of effort? Getting Likes, Getting Shares only Twitter and Facebook and Google+?

    | underthesun808
    0

  • So i just discovered that a site I now managae has a .com version - as well as the .org version that is the one everyone knows about! I'm guessing this is not a good thing... So the whole site eg www.abc.org/example has a mirror page www.abc.com/example.... What should I do about this?    Is it really bad to have 2 versions out there? Thanks!

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • All Welcome! In the old interface, Google Analytics, you can find rare queries (organic traffic) in such a setting: ^ ([^] +) {5.50} [^] + $ (where 5.50 - spaces between words). As an option to use the new interface Google Analytics? This option does not work there?

    | meteorr
    0

  • I am checking my competition with all the metrics available and I have no clue why we are not coming up higher in  ranking on Google. It's been 3 months and we've been bouncing between 9 and 7 position. One competitor just came out of nowhere with almost 600 internal links and few external links and occupied 3rd spot. I've built pretty good portfolio of links with links even coming from Google for crying out loud. My on page optimization is very good, we've even passed W3C with no errors. At least 3 of our competitors above us have less Domain Authority, Page Authority, Back links for external domains, number of external domains, etc... Not sure what is going on. We are not really trying to be the top dog in Google all the time, but it is the principle of a thing. Keyword is Laser Marking. Our domain starts with cms. Don't want to type the whole URL because Google might crawl (maybe a bit of paranoid at this point LOL) Any suggestions?

    | DmitryP
    0

  • Will Bing's engine index and rank a page that has only been seen on social media and has no inbound links? Will Google's? Are inbound links absolutely required to get a page indexed and ranking and getting traffic? If unknown, how would you go about testing this?

    | SarahGoliger
    0

  • Hi guys: i just any one have some idea of how to find the mainly reasons of the listed position on google search original result decrease and the procedures of fixing those problem. Appreciate for any feedback. David

    | skyten
    0

  • Hello All, I am looking to find out how well a page converts in Analytics. A simple request you would thing, but no! First off let me list what I don't want to know: I don't want to know the conversion rate of a product I don't want to know the conversion rate based on the landing page What I want to know is how many people click to add the product to their basket on a particular page (which I understand is not strictly the conversion rate, but whatever). So the ways I have tried unsuccessfully are: The Analytics overlay (the in page Analytics thing) - this doesn't work because the "Add to Basket" button is not a link, it is an input. The Navigation Summary - this doesn't work because most of the time the /shopping_cart.php URL doesn't come up in the short list, and if you search for the URL in the search box beneath the percentages get all skewed. The most obvious solution would be Event tracking but I can't get that implemented in the short term. So does anyone have the answer to this most curious of conundrums? Thanking you in advance, Rich

    | tonyatfat
    0

  • Our company is based in Noida, and in GA, i can see few visits from New Delhi. Both these cities are nearby. ( In India ) Our hosting is in US. When a visitor comes to site, does visit is based on IP address of the user's system ? Our company has taken hosting from Noida.  Does that means that visits from New Delhi are Genuine and NOT  from our company ? My apologies, if i am not clear...

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Hey guys, I'm having the following issue. My keyword position in SERP is usually 10-11 but sometimes (like once a month or so) it drops to like to position 46 or something of that kind. Why would that be happening and what can I do to avoid that stuff?

    | VinceWicks
    0

  • We recently made a few link wheels for specific product pages. We've been having great results with all of the wheels except for one. The one we are having issues with is the only link that we were using a Google Analytics filter on; it looks like this http://domain.com/page.htm?zSource=Specific Keyword%tracking My question is does Google ignore links that are obviously utilizing their analyitcs custom filters? We're doing some more testing to try to find out if it truly is the link or if the wheel is a bad one. There are so many things that could go wrong but with so many of our link wheels working well, I wonder if the filters are what is causing such results.

    | MichealGooden
    0

  • I want to track comparison shopping engine traffic with keywords in Google Analytics. So, How can I get it done? I am using Google Analytics URL Builder to track traffic which are associated to comparison shopping engine. My product page URL load with following format when some one click on comparison shopping engine. Please, see format of product page URL Now, I have problem with tracking as follow. Please, see this Google Analytics traffic sources screen shot to know more. Comparison shopping engine traffic is going to track with other section and not indicate keyword. I want to track keyword which help me to understand more about my product feed performance. It will help me for better understanding regarding keywords which was searched by my customers to land on my website.

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • I generated the following URL to track visits from newsletter. http://www.example.com/ ?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newletter2109 Do i have to use this  link in our email ? My question is it looks ugly. How do i shorten this ?  Using bit.ly ? But isn't it true that  URL shortening services such as bitly, as some can increase the likelihood of email being marked as spam

    | seoug_2005
    1

  • Hello, What is meant by  campaign expiration in Google analytics ? The default value is 6 months. what does it mean ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Hi I'm working on a real estate agents web site which has a lots of links coming from paid listings in real estate linstings sites (this in France so I'm not sure examples will mean anything but basically the agents have 900 house listings in each site and each listing has a backlink) In analytics these are classified as referals and that's fine for the moment But because sites provide different types of links, we are considering tagging all paid links with analytics utm codes. Mainly to learn which ads are actually providing qualified traffic (providing contacts). I'm guessing that currently these links, there are thousands, bring seo value to my client's web site and are not considered as paid links. Will adding the analytics codes to these links cause a loss of their value by clearly indicating to Google that we paid for them? What's the current thinking on this? I'm tempted not to be worried about being honest about the origin of these links but I'm worried that there is a real danger of loosing current ranking Any arguments FOR tagging paid links ? Thanks for you help Neil

    | NeilInFrance
    0

  • We recently changed the url of a client's website.  Is there a way to change the url on the ga account instead of creating a new account so that we don't lose comparative data? Thanks!  Sorry- I know this is a novice question.

    | marketing1234
    0

  • Hi All, I'm trying to track some pages on one website in two separate Google Analytics accounts. Has anybody done this before that could help with the tracking code? Thanks in advance, Elias

    | A_Q
    0

  • When checking our domain on yahoo site explorer, different results are shown for www.theprintspace.de and theprintspace.de. We have done a 301 redirect, as we want to optimise our www.theprintspace.de domain. However, we have a lot more backlinks for theprintspace.de. Is there any way of merging the two, so we don't loose all the linkjuice we get for theprintspace.de and use those links to optimise www.theprintspace.de? Thanks for your help!

    | Waplington
    0

  • Hi There I have been doing some work reducing the number of 404's displayed in the Crawl Errors found in Googles Webmaster Tools. We had a lot of products that were no longer available so have now been removed to reduce the number of 404s that had been found. However, there are a number of URLs that have been crawled that do not exist on our website and have been flagged in the list of Crawl Errors. I want to know if Google will penalise us for this, perhaps affecting our quality score or if they can see that this is something out of our control. This site for example: http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html has generated a lot of truncated URLs on its site that link to pages that don't exist on our site: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri… That is the exact link that it is trying to locate. Here is the report for that particular link. As you can see the content has been scraped by other sites which has spread the problem further. Pages that link to http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri.. URL    Discovery Date
    http://www.justsearchit.com.au/for_flowers_offers,3.html
    Sep 12, 2011
    http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_for.html
    Sep 11, 2011
    http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts.html
    Sep 11, 2011
    http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts_for.html
    Sep 11, 2011
    http://www.flexfinder.com/flowers_offers_unique_gifts.html
    Sep 10, 2011
    http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_with.html
    Sep 10, 2011
    http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html
    Sep 10, 2011
    http://sibd.com/of_flowers_offers_from.html
    Sep 9, 2011
    http://arama.frmpc.com/for_flowers_for_less_ltd_includes.html
    Sep 9, 2011
    http://arama.frmpc.com/flowers_for_less_than_do.html
    Sep 9, 2011 I have spotted a lot of these and currently have around 3.3K 404s in total, a majority are from sites we don't control. Is there an acceptable number of 404s a site should aim for and is the above something we should address or are Google smart enough to work out that we can't fix this ourselves? Thanks! Sam.

    | ArenaFlowers.com
    0

  • I'm getting the warning of "Too many on-page links". I have a number of affiliate marketing sites, all Wordpress, all with sidebars. In the header navigation bar is a link that offers "reviews" and links to each product/brand. This is not a drop down link but leads to a page with product links. Also, in the sidebar I have links that also lead to the products/brands. Redundant yes, but in the beginning this seemed to be a good practice in site design. It would be easy to simply remove the widget that contains the link process in the sidebar. The problem may simply be that the sidebar is the same for every page in the site(s). Is this hurting total SEO as my sites are all over 95-percent indexed. One site in particular does very well in traffic and sales so is removing these links potentially going to improve my SEO and ultimately by success? Thanks, Don

    | JavaManOne
    0

  • hello, I have a site with 100's of pdf's for download and I would like to track how many people are downloading these, does anyone have a simple solution for this? Is there anyway I can do this in Google Analytics using one piece of code, thanks...

    | Socialdude
    0

  • I have spent quit some time now, trying to figure this out. I wannt to segment landingoage traffic to the longtail content. That's content in the 3rd or 4th subdirectorylevel. I would like to do that by saying google: "Just show me traffic that arrives on landingpages with 3 OR 4 slashes "/" But I can't get a solution, can anybody help in the seoMOZ community?

    | viventuraSEO
    0

  • I'm reading some reports from my first crawl of 10K pages and I'm wondering if it's wise to mark the archives "no-follow." I have a WP tool that provides a tool that offers the no follow for categories or archives recommending to choose either one or the other but not both. What would be the best solution?

    | JavaManOne
    0

  • I have read that after the Panda update a site's bounce rate is an important ranking metric.  However, can anyone confirm whether all pages count equally?  For instance, my home page gets 5000% more traffic than Deep Page X.  If Deep Page X has a poor bounce rate, does it matter as much as if my Homepage has a bad bounce rate? I am guessing not, but wanted to open it up for discussion. If not, it has me wondering on what to do for some of my database driven content.  I have some dynamically created pages that have higher bounce rates and minimal unique content.  They aren't pure spam or junk, but are likely only about 1% unique from one another. Sounds like a no brainer change post-Panda, right?  Well, what if I was the only one targeting the keywords for these pages?  The pages pull from info I stored on the U.S. government stimulus program (related to my industry).  It then has just about every city, state and county combo in the country for my product.  For instance, a page <title>might be "Flemington, NJ Widgets - Somerset County".  Something that no one else is targeting and drives minimal traffic.</p> <p> </p> <p>Do I take this content down?  I didn't have any affects, positive or negative from Panda, so I am hesitant to take down thousands of Google cached pages.</p></title>

    | TheDude
    0

  • Hi Guys I am finding this in one of my sites analytics allot   /tr-url/en-ru.ru/ followed directly by the site in questions domain name and page of interest....like this.. /tr-url/en-ru.ru/www.example.com/blue-widget/ and example.com being the analytics of the site in question. Are these pages that have been translated? like by yandex or something in that line....I cannot seem to find anything on this anywhere. What is this and should i be concerned?? thanks for the help cheers

    | nomad-202323
    0

  • I wonder if someone can help me understand some data I'm seeing in Google Analytics. SetUp Goal with 3 step Funnel Date Comparison is 1st-8th September & 1st-8th June The Data (pics attached) Looking at the Goal Conversion Rate I can see: September - 11.58% vs June - 10.42% an increase which Google shows as (+11.18%) For same time period Abandonment Rate is showing September - 71.3% vs June - 61.5% - an increase which Google shows as (+16.5%) The Questions How can I bee seeing both an increase in conversion rate AND and increase in Abandonment rate on the funnel? And why doesnt "(Conversion Rate + Abandonment Rate) = 100%" ? Many thanks for any help! yqwFP.png cj5dn.png

    | TobiasM
    0

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