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Category: Reporting & Analytics

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


  • I have a 3rd party booking engine that is causing my own domain to show up as a top referreral in google analytics.  The vendor is on my very last nerve 🙂  So they're not helping. Would anyone be interested in helping a newbie out with a frustrating problem? Code: Reservations Page - function SubmitReservationForm() {. . . .
                ResLink = "http://www.bookingengine.com/res/vn4/checka.aspx?month=" + Month + "&day=" + Day + "&year=" + Year + "&nights=" + Nights + "&rooms=" + Rooms + "&adults=" + Adults + "&children=" + Children + "&B1=Check+Availability&hotelid=xxxx"
                pageTracker._link(ResLink);
                return true;
            } On Every page: Any thoughts would be appreciated!  I believe the problem  is             pageTracker._link(ResLink); but I'm clueless on fixing it.

    | jenny05
    1

  • Social media about Facebook and Twitter, which one is most friendly for google Ranking or Increase your website vs opponents?

    | diyawards
    0

  • I am developing a video strategy for a pediatric dentist office. I am trying to develop a set of topics based on which existing videos perform best. What are the characteristics I should be evaluating (besides basics like views and comments)?

    | joshfialkoff-77863
    0

  • Hi All, Question around the site: query you can execute on Google for example. Now I know it has lots of inaccuracies, but I like to keep a high level sight of it over time. I was using it to also try and get a high level view of how many product pages were indexed vs. the total number of pages. What is interesting is when I do a site: query for say www.newark.com I get ~748,000 results returned. When I do a query for www.newark.com "/dp/" I get ~845,000 results returned. Either I am doing something stupid or these numbers are completely backwards? Any thoughts? Thanks, Ben

    | BenRush
    0

  • Hi, I am going to publish a press release on a number of different websites. First and foremost, I want to build anchor links back to website for specific keywords. Secondly I want to measure clickthrus from each site using parameter tracking in GA. I want to know if I put in a url with ?utm_source=xxx, will this have any impact upon my linkbuilding efforts? i.e. will search engines attribute the keyword to the long url with tracking or the url without tracking. I understand that everything from the ? mark is ignored. However, i just want to double check before I publish release. Thanks for your help. Mik

    | increation
    0

  • Hey, How do shortened links show up in GA? So if I tweet about something and use bitly, does twitter get the referral? I am thinking not. I have never seen bitly show up as a referrer, but we gets lots of clicks from those links. Hmmmm. Anyone? E

    | ErinTM
    0

  • A relatively high ranking site disappeared from the linking root domains of a client site, and the site dropped significantly in domain rank, authority, and trust. Oddly enough, traffic is almost double the previous week, and search results for keywords remain strong. I checked OSE and the linking domain is not listed. There are also several other linking root domains that have never shown in the domain analysis, but we'll leave those for a later topic. I visited the linking root domain that disappeared from the analysis and found everything to be in order. The site is a major local forum with a relatively high domain authority. All links are still there, and there hasn't been any change to the site as far as links are treated according to the owner. The only thing that has changed since the last site analysis is an event campaign ran with unpaid ads posted throughout the forum. The site being analyzed is a catering company that is cooperating with the forum owner and local bar to host a local celebratory event. Of course I'll wait for the next indexing to see if things change, but what could be going on here? This is more of an SEOmoz question, as we're talking over 10 point deduction in domain authority, although search results are still strong.

    | kwoolf
    0

  • We built a landing page with a wufoo form.  Inside the wufoo form is a link going to another page on our website.  We are wondering if clicking on that link will result in a bounce since it is in an iframe. We are using google analytics.

    | seozachz
    0

  • Please forgive my stupidity if there is something obvious here which I have missed (I keep assuming that must be the case), but any advice on this would be much appreciated. We've just acquired a new client. Despite having a site for plenty of time now they did not previously have analytics with their last company (I know, a crime!). They've been with us for about a month now and we've managed to get them some great rankings already. To be fair, the rankings weren't bad before us either. Anyway. They have multiple position one rankings for well searched terms both locally and nationally. One would assume therefore that a lot of their traffic would come from Google right? Not according to their analytics. In fact, very little of it does... instead, 70% of their average 3,000 visits per month comes from just one referring site. A framed version of their site which is through reachlocal, which itself doesn't rank for any of their terms. I don't get it... The URL of the site is: www.namgrass.co.uk (ignore there being a .com too, that's a portal as they cover other countries). The referring site causing me all this confusion is: http://namgrass.rtrk.co.uk/ (see source code at the bottom for the reachlocal thing). Now I know reach local certainly isn't sending them all that traffic, so why does GA say it is... and what is this reachlocal thing anyway?? I mean, I know what reachlocal is, but what gives here with regards to it? Any ideas, please??

    | SteveOllington
    0

  • I need some help from anyone that has deal with this issue before.. We are currently running BigCommerce for the shopping cart on chinamist.com. We have enabled e-commerce tracking through Google Analytics and the revenue tracks perfectly. The only issue is that the referring sources are not tracking directly to the revenue being displayed - for the source, all analytics shows is (none). The assumption is that the tracking issue is a result of having a domain and subdomain.. but 'domain and subdomain' was selected when setting up the sites' advanced analytics script. Does anyone have any tips? We've run into a dead end here.. One final note, we're running an Adwords campaign which is showing conversions through the Adwords side of reporting. After integrating the Adwords and Analytics accounts, the analaytics account is still not showing revenue/conversions from Adwords as a source. Appreciate the feedback.

    | Investis_Digital
    0

  • Recently, there has been a lot of great information on SEOmoz about using Google Apps, Docs, etc. However, I suffer from Google paranoia (the fear that Google can see what's going on in my Google products). Is this fear unreasonable? Should I be concerned about using Google Apps, docs, analytics, etc. for SEO data (including keyword position tracking, back link analysis, etc)?

    | Gyi
    0

  • I just wonder if we can measure outgoing visits from a specific URL with an online tool or not?

    | merkal2005
    0

  • When I look at my Analytics using any of my segments, they don't work. It shows zero visits for the segment until April 30th, then the visitors for the segment shoots up to above the number for all visits! Anyone else experiencing this bizarre data?

    | mascotmike
    0

  • Good morning afternoon, how are you guys doing today? I'm experiencing a few Panda issues I'm trying to fix, and I was hoping I could get some help here about one of my problems. I used Google analytics to extract pages people land on after a Google search. I'm trying to identify thin pages that potentially harm my website as a whole. It turns out I have a bunch of pages in the likes of the following: /search?cd=15&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&source=www.google .co.uk, and so on for a bunch of countries (.fi, .com, .sg, .pk, and so on, maybe 50 of them) My question is: what are those pages? their stats are awful, usually 1 visitor, 100% bounce rate, and 0 links. Do you think they can explain my dramatic drop in traffic following Panda? If so, what should I do with them? NOINDEX? Deletion? What would you suggest? I also have a lot of links in the likes of the following: /google-search?cx=partner-pub-6553421918056260:armz8yts3ql&cof=FORID:10&ie=ISO-8859-1&sa=Search&siteurl=www.mysite.com/content/article They lead to custom search pages. What should I do with them? Almost two weeks ago, Dr. Pete posted an article untitled Fat Panda and Thin Content in which he deals with "search within search" and how they might be targeted by Panda. Do you think this is the issue I'm facing? Any suggestion/help would be much appreciated! Thanks a lot and have a great day 🙂

    | Ericc22
    0

  • Bit of an odd one but I've been getting a large and steady stream of traffic over the last few months from a very random keyword that according to addwords figures shows "on data". Its our second biggest referring term only beaten by our brand name. We get more traffic from this term than keywords we have invested a lot of time in that show thousands of traffic volume in addwords. When looking at behavioral data its gets odder, a bounce rate of 98.11% time on site 2 seconds and page visits 1.02.  So this traffic isn't real traffic and it's not real people. So my questions are, what is it? why do we get this random traffic, has anyone els noticed things like this and is it a problem? I presume it must be something to do with some sort of spam but apart from that i'm stumped. It's just one of those things that has been bugging me so I would appreciate any help. Kind Regards Paul

    | pauldoffman
    0

  • Hello, I manage a site with visitors from many different countries. With Google Analytics, it is normal to see the number of visitors from each search engine. However, I would like to identify the number of visitors from each Google-search contry domain. How many visitors from Google.com? How many from Google.co.uk. And from Google.co.zm? And so on. Anybody knows if this is possible and if yes, how can it be done? Thank you in advance, Dario

    | Darioz
    0

  • Hello everyone, My e-commerce website traffic dropped by 75% overnight,  on April 12th. The website has been around since 2003 and growing every year. Over the years gained some great placement for some competitive keywords and stayed on page 1 for some time. After the Panda update, some of our major keywords dropped from page 1 to page 10. The first Panda update had a slightly negative effect on us, by bumping up all the brand's websites (brands we carry) placing the brands in the first couple positions (giving them 2-3 first spots) pushing us down. However, the Panda 2 killed us. I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on my situation. Did anyone ever have luck or would recommend contacting Google, and asking them for advise or reasons why the site was dropped. The website in question is www.instyleswimwear.com Thanks in advance,
    Alex

    | AlexGop
    0

  • With Google's new local search I am more curious as to market penetration on keywords that are now localized to my different US cities. I understand that you can separate out Google traffic based on regional Google domains, but I am curious if there is an effective way to separate out searches and keywords based on a my local US Metros? If google cannot do this, any recommendations on products that can? Thanks.

    | Thos003
    1

  • Hey everyone, In the last hour I was doing some SEO referral reportingin Google Analytics and discovered that my April data was completely gone (flat lined to zero).  Specifically, if i select a date range for any point in april and select search from the advanced segments area I am seeing this issue. This is happening for ALL of my active clients... anyone else seeing this?

    | dpeddle
    0

  • whats the best way to separate Google Shopping from regular organic traffic in analytics?

    | DavidKonigsberg
    0

  • Hi, All! I would like to create a custom report that will enable me to see which of my pages are contributing to goal completion on my site (so I can then optimize the pages that are contributing the most, with maximal ROI for the optimization investment). If I make the dimension "page/page title" and the metric "goal X completions" - which would make sense - what exactly are the numbers that I am seeing telling me? Is it how many times a person started the goal funnel from that pages (meaning every goal would appear only once and there be no overlap)? That doesn't appear to be the case with the numbers, because the headline in the main "Goals" section tells me I have 30 goal completions for that goal, for example, but the headline in the custom report (which is adding up all the numbers) is, say, 100. Or does it mean the number of times that this page was ever in the navigation path of someone who ended up completing a goal? Then the same goal would be counted multiple times, for each page in the path. Additionally, I see this strange thing on some of my reports where the actual funnel pages appear as contributing towards goals, which I guess makes sense, but again the numbers don't match up. If the goal was to get to page B, and the funnel was A->B, and there were supposedly 30 goal completions, my custom report says that A gave 28 goal completions and B gave 25. Anyone know for sure - or through testing - what the case is with all these things? Any explanations will be much appreciated!

    | debi_zyx
    0

  • On 4.23 i requested a site crawl. My site only has about 550 pages. So how can we get faster crawls?

    | joemas99
    0

  • Hello, Is there at tool to see how many pages were indexed in google for a particular website historically? Thanks

    | soeren.hofmayer
    0

  • As my mobile numbers are going up in Google Analytics I'm trying to figure out what phone runs what browser.  I see that 93% of mobile users have Safari which I believe is iPhone, iPad and iPods.  There is a 6% usage of "Mozilla Compatible Agent".  What cell phone would this be?

    | LabadieAuto
    0

  • Hi, Has anyone made functions to get link metrics from SEOmoz API in Google docs spreadsheet? Page Authority Domain Authority Linking Root Domains Total Links _Thanks to Tom Critchlow I got the social metrics, now I just need the ones from SEOmoz api. _ Any help would be sweet.

    | EdgySEO
    0

  • Hi, I've just created my first campaign and noticed that on the competitive analysis our website is having a lot of nofollow links: more than 50% I did some research on the web to learn more about nofollow links, but I don't understand why this percentage is so big especially compared to the other websites in the analysis (less than 10%)? Anyone any ideas? Thanks!

    | poupette
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, you say there are no dumb questions, here is one. We've build an iPhone App for our Website working-dog.eu. So users can read there new messages with ease when they are out of the office, read about breeds, ... do all the nice stuff they want. I don't think so, but is it possible to track these users with Google Analytics? When the come via App, the Analytics code will not run for them. But maybe it could start an AJAX request or something like this? But how should the code run, without a browser which can interprete JavaScript? So, in short: Is it possible to track users from iPhone App with Google Analytics? Kind regards Patrick

    | mdoegel
    0

  • Hey everyone, We've recently seen a strange, unexplainable occurrence from one of our new websites.  We have been moving up in the rankings with the site since it was put online and some of the pages even jumped to #1 for their keyword category. However the following week we lost all of those places.  Pages that were drowning in #1 were now just barely getting their feet wet in the 80s or 90s, and some pages in the 90s were lost completely from the charts. Is there any way we may have gotten penalized for something on our site? Does Google penalize?  Or do they have bugs like this for some reason? Any response would be helpful. Thank you very much! Just for reference, the domain in question is www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com

    | jid
    0

  • I guess Google Analytics messes up my paid and unpaid visits. In the list of top 10 kw's sending non-paid traffic it shows 5 very short kw's that we don't rank for at all (checked with RankTracker - we are not in first 50 search results). But these are the kw's we advertise for... One more proof: Webmaster Tools 'Search queries' shows 10 times less 'Clicks' from organic search than Google Analytics. Is there anyone who is experiencing this kind of problems with GA? Is there anything you can do with it?

    | Alexey_mindvalley
    0

  • Does anyone have any recommendations or resources for best practices in using Google Analytics. Specifically, as they relate to SEO and managing and monitoring several websites (i.e. registering/managing multiple accounts vs. master account, etc).

    | Gyi
    0

  • So one of my client's wants to know why he shouldn't just hire GoDaddy to "do SEO" for him! He found this page: http://www.godaddy.com/search-engine/seo-services.aspx Without actually trying it, It looks like a bunch of stuff I already do (rank tracking, PR tracking, traffic tracking, ROI projections), stuff I shouldn't do (site submissions to search engines), and stuff I probably don't need ("keyword wizard"). That said, I am intrigued by: the dedicated phone number with track and monitor (is it better than Hosted Numbers?), the business listing (is it a link worth the $6/mo?), site analysis and optimization, and ROI dashboard. Does anyone have any experience with this? Does any piece of it have any value?

    | TheEspresseo
    1

  • So I am trying to track ecommerce transactions on a Prostores site and GA is dropping the source because the checkout is on prostores domain instead of the store domain. All ecommerce transactions show a source of the actual website as a referral. I've read googles documentation on tracking across multiple domains but just can't quite get it right. Can anyone help me out? Here is my tracking code: ss:commentdo nothing</ss:comment>

    | BlinkWeb
    0

  • I've set up several goals for one of my clients in Google Analytics.  The ones that relate to things on the site -- such as clicking on the "Contact Us" button -- work just fine.  However, I set up one that is tracking when someone clicks on a purchase button, which sends the user to a third party site (PayPal).  This one doesn't seem to work.  (I purchased and item and the goal was not recorded).  Looking to see if I have to do anything different when setting up the goal.

    | EricVallee34
    0

  • How can I view/download all my backlinks in google webmaster ? Currently when I try to download or view it shows only "Top 14 domains linking to" information and not ALL the links.. Any thoughts?

    | krishru
    0

  • Hi, Any suggestion which is the best FREE keyword ranking tool. I know digital point offers one but they will install some script in the site which might slow it down... Is there any alternative?

    | krishru
    0

  • Hi, Google Analytics does not provide IP addresss of the visitors. What if i develop some in-house tracking mechanism to do so? Is it allowed or will Google penalize me if it comes to know about it? Thanks

    | IM_Learner
    0

  • I am working on a site with over 30 million pages. Every time I get about  One Million indexed I get a Message in the Google Webmasters Tools saying "Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site" The indexing then starts dropping like a Rock. I need to get the site indexed. Please Help!

    | GlobalFlex
    0

  • I see large differences in Google and Bing/Yahoo SERP results for many keywords. Google shows many of our primary keywords in their top ten, while Bing/Yahoo rank the same one 40-50 or above. Do you have any insight on their differences that might account for this variation? We are legitimate, long time, white hatters at a small manufacturer that is one of the leaders in our industry. The only thing I can think of that might describe  this issue is PPC advertising. Their algorithms wouldn't be that inconsistent would they? (We do much more paid advertising on Google) But generally this should have no affect, right? Thanks, George...

    | rhawk
    0

  • Obviously all my indexed links have changed. How can I avoid loosing page rank?

    | HeadlandMachinery
    0

  • At times when I change something on my site it effects my rankings.  For my business I care mostly about my rankings in certain locations (not local).  How can I see how I am ranking in various locations at a given time?  I see several tools out there, but none of them seem to work. For example I recently I added a badge to my site and my ranking dropped a spot locally, but I do not think it did elsewhere.  The value of the badge is worth that if it is just local, but if it made me drop a ranking in one of my major markets it would not be worth it.

    | RobDalton
    0

  • Hi, My client purchased a domain which based on the seller "promising lots of traffic". Subsequent investigation showed it was a scam and that the seller had been creative in Photoshop with some GA reports. Nevertheless, my client had redirected the acquired domain to their primary domain (via the domain registrar). From the period on which the acquired domain was redirected to the point when we removed the redirect, the web log files had a high volume of spider/bot 404 errors relating to an online pharmaacy - viagra, pills etc. The account does not seem to have been hacked. No additional files are present and the rest of the logs seem normal. As soon as the redirect was removed the spider 404 errors stopped. Aside from the advice about acquiring domains promising traffic which I've already discussed with my client, does anybody have any ideas about how a redirect could cause the 404 errors? Thanks

    | bjalc2011
    0

  • I'm interested in passing this info on to a client who experienced a period of time when an incorrect GA code was installed on their homepage. They were able to get Google stats on second level pages only. This is a site that gets 80 + % of visits from organic search engine referrals. They do minimal advertising. Thanks in advance.

    | alankoen123
    0

  • Hi, To what degree do you think user signals like bunce rate, time on site, pages per visit are a factor in search rank? I know Google says they don't use Google Analytics to get data (and I believe them), but I don't think they would need to use G/A to know your bounce rate and other user signals. All things being equal, wouldn't a non-blog site with a 70% bounce rate (that doubled in the last year) have a big negative to overcome in how Google sees the quality of that site and how it then ranks its terms? Thanks... Mike

    | 94501
    0

  • Total Links : 15,967 Ext. Followed Links : 2,078 Linking Root Domains : 177 Followed Linking Root Domains : 125 Linking C-Blocks : 117 Simple question, answers in English please. What are these?

    | GeniusGoodsInc
    0

  • Hi there, pl take a look at this link, there is a section which says shared results and has a star against two agencies and  once article. can pl someone let me know what those starts are and how to get them? Thank you 🙂 so sorry - the link is http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=digital+mareketing+agency+los+angeles Vijay

    | vijayvasu
    0

  • Hello, I've been trying to figure out the best way to track traffic and sales for a subdomain mobile site and would appreciate any feedback or guidance. I've set up an advanced segment but have found that I'm not able to source traffic since the segments get disabled when trying to view top content pages. I've also setup an additional sub-profile under the main domain profile in google analytics and have set up an advanced filter using the following guildelines http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSite.html In the Profile Settings page, click the Add Filter link. Choose Add New Filter and provide the filter a name. Choose Custom Filter and select Advanced on the Filter type settings. Under Advanced settings: FieldA should be set to Hostname FieldB should be set to Request URI Set the values for both Field A and Field B to (.*), which is an expression that captures all characters. Set the Output To --> Constructor option to Request URI and provide $A1$B1 as the value for that choice. I'm unsure if I've set up the profile / filter correctly, the traffic stats are different than the segment.  The mobile profile is also tracking all ecommerce transactions instead of just mobile. Here's the code I have in place. we're using the Traditional code Thanks, Jamie

    | marketing_zoovy.com
    0

  • This page has not been crawled for five months: http://www.flowerpetal.com/index.jsp?info=13 1/2 that time it was linked to from the homepage of a pr5 site: http://flowerpetal.com/ Why is this the case?

    | tylerfraser
    0

  • We've noticed a 100% increase in our traffic over the last three days. However, the page views have not increased proportionately. The traffic sources seemed to be dispersed naturally. Could this be a Ddos in the making or some other type of attack as it seems unlikely that we suddenly started receiving thousands of extra visitors. Its a leading news website with a consistent heavy traffic daily which just doubled over the last three days. What should we be looking at?

    | RishadShaikh59
    0

  • Can anyone suggest the best way to track the effectiveness of internal linking on a website? Thanks!

    | RishadShaikh59
    0

  • What are for you the 5 most important reports into Google Analytics? Thank you for yours answers guys, Jonathan Leplang

    | JonathanLeplang
    0

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