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Category: Reporting & Analytics

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


  • 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

  • I've been using a wordpress blog and using google analytics and webmaster tools. I'd never done very much optimizing of my site, my strategy had always been to just keep writing relevant posts and let google do the rest. At some point I installed a SEO plugin to wordpress and did a tiny amount of tweaking, but I noticed that in my webmaster tools page, all my "links to this site" links are gone!  My site map says 42 pages submitted, 42 pages indexed, but all the links that I've built over the past few years are missing, and I also notice that I can't find my main landing page in the index anymore.  I know there are indexed sites out there that link to me, but they aren't being reflected anymore.  Did I anger google by using SEO plugins within wordpress?  I'm fairly certain I wasn't doing anything sketchy. Http://brodiegraphics.com RTOH6.png

    | HELPeR
    0

  • Dose someone have / know a full list / resource  with commands for google and bing ? Including filters for those commands ? (site:domain.com -filter etc) (like: site:domain.com, link:domain.com etc) I use the basic ones b ut I know there are much more and that there are several filters that can be used with success to filter down results. Thanks.

    | eyepaq
    1

  • Here is the scenario I often wonder about: My client's  tree removal service is ranking in #1 in local search for
    "tree removal  town state." His Google Places account is set for a 30 mile radius. He has lots of directory listings and positive reviews. Some inbound links as well. The same client is ranking #1 in organic listing for "tree removal county state" ...I chose to target the county for organic listings because the client was dominating local search for the town. My reasoning: I thought, Google local search would bring all of the local specific searches for "tree removal town state" and organic listings would bring the broader searches for "tree removal county state." That is exactly what's happening and stats show there are some visitors coming to the site searching with the county name. Not a ton of traffic but a lot of keyword variations using the county name. The bulk of the traffic comes from the his Google Places listing for the town the business is located in which is great. Dilemma: My client is not ranking in local search results for neighboring towns just a few miles away and certainly not ranking in organic listings for neighboring towns either because we are targeting the county. He has a long list of town names he services in the footer area and this does seem to help for organic search in neighboring towns with little competition. Broad Question: How can I optimize pages for the same services in neighboring towns without duplicating content. For example, the home page title tag and H1 reads:
    Tree Removal, Tree Trimming, Stump Removal, County State It would be very easy to create identical pages with title tags and page headings for the different towns but that would undoubtedly create duplicate content and would look weird to someone browsing the site. Specific Questions: Should I put the town name where the business is located in the title tag even though the site already ranks #1 for that town in local search, without having the town in the title tag? Why not use this importunity for an area that we are not ranking for? Do I nix the county and state and try to insert another town or two in the title and H1? Ideally I would like to have this site rank well in local search for all of the neighboring towns. This may be too broad of a post, (it is my first one) but perhaps there are a few of you out there that can outline strategies that work for service industries like, lawn care, tree removal, landscaping, etc. Thanks for reading.

    | MozMan2
    0

  • Is there a way to track Google & Bing Shopping referrals independent of standard Google/Bing tracking? It would be nice if we could see the difference between Google PPC, Google Organic & Google Shopping. I notice in analytics that we get some traffic from  google/ppc, some from google/organic, some from google.com/referral (not sure what this is), and some from googlebase/cse (I know this is Google shopping, but I don't think it's tracking all shopping referral visits as this).

    | JerDoggMckoy
    0

  • When I look at my Google Analytics code, I see that the same content will show up twice, once with a / at the end of the URL, and once without. My site is at http://www.skypeenglishclasses.com. Does anyone know why this would happen? Is it duplicate content?

    | Paulguy
    0

  • Hi! One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com.  When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com.  Is this because of the subdomain issue? How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain? Thanks!

    | debi_zyx
    0

  • I don't know if the title makes sense, but here's my question... Our newspaper website has multiple categories like World, Sport, Entertainment etc. Now, a story, belonging to the entertainment section maybe published on the entertainment page but is likely to have a slot somewhere on the Home page as well as other pages. The same goes for stories in sport etc. However, the url displays the date folllowed by the post title and thats it, no category name. Now, a user may end up going to a detailed story that belongs to the entertainment section (from the home page or any other page) without actually having visited the entertainment page. However, for tracking purposes, we want to see how many hits we got on the entertainment page and any story belonging to that particular section. So, my question is how do I go about creating filters that can help me track category page and detail story hits as one? Or, should I ammend the url structure (keep in mind we are using wordpress for our news website) to include category after the date and would this solve my problem of tracking? I asked a similar question recently but maybe I did not explain myself clearly. Thanks!

    | RishadShaikh59
    0

  • Since there are no dumb questions, here's mine: Our url structure currently displays the date followed by the post title. However, our news website has many categories like world, sports, entertainment etc. Now, when tracking in GA we get to see how many hits a specific page is getting (like entertainment) but since the category is not defined in the URL GA does not add the detail story views to the category page views. To illustrate further, a story from the entertainment section maybe displayed on the Home page and a reader may click on that story and read it without going to the entertainment page. This however, does not reflect in the analytics for that specific page(in this example, the entertainment page). My question is, should we ammend the url structure to include the categories, if so, would the editor have to do that while composing the post or is there some other way. We are using WP. Or should I create some filters or something on GA. Thanks!

    | RishadShaikh59
    0

  • Greetings, When running Google Analytics' keyword report, I see that the over 85% of the top 100 keywords used to find us include a word in our name (Eagle's Nest Foundation and Camp -- with "eagle" or "eagle's nest" being the most frequent) or the name of one of our programs.   Does this mean that most folks searching for summer camps in North Carolina already know about us and that we therefore need to optimize for broader keywords, to cast a wider net for folks who don't already know about us? Thanks, Dave

    | DMoff
    0

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