Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
-
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics.
These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3").
This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines.
Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs.
Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
-
Thanks for the regex insight, Mark.
I haven't been able to find a common denominator yet, but I'll keep looking.
-
Not sure why this is growing recently, but when learning regex for Google Analytics with the awesome LunaMetrics regex guide, I remember coming across the need to write brand names for advanced segments and to cover the possibility of two words being written with or without a space. Don't remember exactly where I saw it, but since then I've been writing them this way (\s|+), if I were writing seomoz for a brand advanced segment, and wanted to cover seo moz and seomoz, I would do it seo(\s|+)?moz
Basically, the regex for a space is \s, but analytics sometimes treats spaces as +, so to cover your bases, you do it either with a \s or a +.
My point is, this has been around for a while - not sure why the sudden increase, but I know this has been around for quite a bit. Maybe try drilling down a bit and seeing if you can find a common denominator here about the traffic and what is causing it.
Mark
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to configure multilingual site in google analytic? Currently showing in Referral Traffic why?
Hello All, Currently my Multilingual site is showing in referral traffic is it because I have not added hreflang tag on site? If yes and if I add the hreflang tag on all sites when where it will show in google analytic traffic from international sites? And what type of configuration required in analytic? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | pragnesh96390 -
Search and Replace filter on Google Analytics?
Hello! On our GA account for one of our clients, we'd like to add a search and replace filter to the Views section of the account. The URL is www.askergoworks.com (it redirects to askergoworks.com), and Google has flagged us to have redundant hostnames. This is why we'd like to add the filter. Would the regular expression be askergoworks.com|www.askergoworks.com ? Any help would be great - I'm not a regex expert, so I really don't how to go about this. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | AGILITY0 -
Tracking Google places (7 pack listing) traffic in google analytics
Is there a way to see Google Places traffic (traffic from users clicking through the 7 pack listings) segmented in Google analytics ? Normally is it just lumped together with the organic traffic ? Can you see the search phrases used to find your site, or do they also show up under 'not provided' when from Google Places. Im aware i can see some limited data in the Google Places analytics, but these seem to be 2 days behind when ever i view them.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sam-P0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
How do I cancel a scheduled Dashboard report in Google Analytics?
I created a few Dashboards in Google Analytics and scheduled them to be emailed for the next 6 months. Now I want to cancel those scheduled emails and am not finding those Dashboard reports/emails anywhere so I can cancel them. Do you know how to stop these emails from being sent?
Reporting & Analytics | | cindyt-170380 -
Is Google analytics not working properly anymore?
Hi mozzers, We launched a website 2 months ago and when monitoring Organic data on GA we had an average of 23% bounce rate like a month ago but the last 2 weeks I noticed that bounce rate=0%. This is very weird especially that we haven't modified the existing pages and that multiple keywords show an average site duration of 0 seconds. Any thoughts about this discrepancy? Do you think that there is an issue with the GATC implemented? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Google Analytics internal Site Search - Destination pages dispaly Search results
Hi, Im having a bit of an issue with Google Analytics internal site search, I am able to currently track the search terms through my website internal search but when I click onto destination pages I just get the search result page. When clicking destination pages I would expect to get the pages on which the user ended up after the results page, instead I just get the results page which is pretty much useless ?submitsearchXXXXXX hope you can help, look forward to your response. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Tug-Agency1 -
Google Analytic Tracking Issue (&utm_nooverride=1)
Hello, We have a problem that means we are unable to track our AdWords and organic work at all. Looking at "/All Traffic Sources" and clicking on "Ecommerce Tab" in Analytics we can see that (made up ratio :)):
Reporting & Analytics | | jannkuzel
£2 is attributed to Google/ CPC
£1 is attributed to Google / Organic
But £100 to Payment Provider/ referral and also various referrals from banking transaction pages. All of the revenue/conversions are being credited to the payment provider or the bank security checks the payment goes through. After having done some research we have found that the problem may be that Google Analytics attributes the purchase to the most recent click (on the payment provider button) rather than the initial click on the cpc campaign/organic or direct etc. Some people have suggested using the "&utm_nooverride=1"
tag which we wanted to run past you guys and confirm whether adding
this tag to the payment provider 'buy now' button on our website will
presumably fix this referral problem? Alternatively does the tag need
to be entered into our CPC campaigns as well? Or can you please guide
us in another way? We have also heard that "cross-domain" tracking could be the solution. So we are really confused what to do and where hoping someone had maybe been through something similar and could advice before we fully launch into a solution. In addition, it should be noted that our 'Goals Funnel Visualisation'
of 'checkout' breaks up at the penultimate stage of the checkout. All
customers exit through the /checkout_process (penultimate) but are recognised returning to the successful checkout page but there is a missing link in between these
two stages as 0% pass through is shown even though they do return? Thank you so much in advance for all your help.0