Segmenting traffic from referring sites in GA

[seoug_2005]

Most of our  traffic is from Referring sites, and in referring sites, job sites are sending most of the traffic. How can we segment traffic from job sites. There are about 40 such sites. We would like to receive a report which shows traffic excluding from these job sites.

[Paessler]

Hi, I have just read the Seomoz blog article about regular expressions: it contains a very helpful tip for using Advanced Segments:

"You could also use Advanced Segments to create a social media segment - select source and set the condition to matches Regular Expression.  Your value should be something like facebook|twitter|youtube|digg etc."

Just exchange facebook|twitter|youtube|digg for parts of the URL you want to exclude, and that's it.

Here is the URL of the blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-regex

[Paessler]

No, if you include (i.e. say "does not contain") " jobs", this will only exclude jobsearch.naukri.com. In this example, you could include "naukri" or "naukri.com". However, this will only work if you do not get traffic from other pages containing naukri, which are not job related.

[seoug_2005]

These are the 2 sites sending maximum traffic jobsearch.naukri.com firstnaukri.com My question is if i include just "jobs", would this exclude traffic from both these sources

[seoug_2005]

Thanks Manischa. I will do as told and will post the outcome of my effort here

[Paessler]

Hi Atul,

You can do this with advanced segments in GA.

Firstly, if you do not have it already, assemble a list of the job sites that you want to exclude.

The most important thing is to get a list of up to 10 words that together cover all of the URLs to be excluded. Look for similar patterns in their URLs (e.g., some of them might have the word "job" in their URL, others "recruitment"). I believe the limit of different variables for one advanced segment is around 10 (not sure about the number though, but 10 is at least possible), that is why you cannot just add all 40 URLs to the segment. However, the words should be descriptive enough so they are not included in other referrers to your site.

Then go to GA: Create a new advanced segment, from the Dimensions, take source (under Traffic Sources), set it to "Does not contain" and add the first of your words. Then add an Or Statement, and put in the next word. And so on. When you use this Advanced Segment, you will not see the job referrers anymore.