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Category: Reporting & Analytics

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

  • seoisfun


    I recently read Rob Beirne's piece on how and why to set up an adjusted bounce rate in Google Analytics (https://moz.com/blog/adjusted-bounce-rate). I am getting myself ready to talk to our site team about why we should set up an adjusted bounce rate and am anticipating some questions I'd like to be able to answer: 1. Will an adjusted bounce rate improve the accuracy of our avg time on page metrics? 2. Are we able to keep the unadjusted bounce rate in GA as well, so we can compare the two metrics if we ever need to? Does anyone know the answers to these questions? Any help would be much appreciated!

    | seoisfun
    0
  • kvncrll


    My site is only 11 months old but has steadily (if not slowly) been gaining backlinks. My question, is why Moz shows me at 303 backlinks and Google search console is showing at 1,237? I am more than a little suspicious that this could highlight the reason Moz shows such an unfavorable DA ranking for our site at a DA12.  Other competitors that rank for similar keywords to mine are DA 42, DA 65, DA 73, etc. If the largest ranking factor is links, and they have mine reported incorrectly - is this the issue with DA as it relates to sites like mine? Any answer from someone who has experienced similar, or has a definitive answer is more than welcome to chime in! Thanks, Kevin

    | kvncrll
    0
  • yaelslater


    Hi All,I've got a question about measuring the impact of schema. We implemented FAQ schema on a few pages such that the questions and answers written on the page are now displayed directly on the SERP.Google Search Console now provides both total page clicks and rich results clicks (under Search Appearance).  To get total clicks on the page, do you simply add up the total page and rich results clicks? Or do the rich results clicks represent interactions with the accordion, rather than a click through to the page? And if both clicks are represented differently, does that mean that the page is only sometimes being rendered on the SERP as a rich result?Any guidance would be appreciated!Thanks.

    | yaelslater
    0
  • RandyHT


    What is the deal with the search reports in the Google My Business app?  I downloaded this app so prospective customers could message my business, and when I look at the search reports on the app, the results seem nonsensical.  According to google analytics my business receives pretty steady traffic every day.  Why does the report say that I receive zero visitors one day and 400 the next? (See the screenshot below) 4yLRCHG

    | RandyHT
    1
  • Johnroger


    Hello, I am not sure if i made an error. Can someone please point out. On our sales form, when a user submits the form, the URL displayed is - https://x-y.com/thank-you-2/ I created a Goal like this - 1 ) Under Goal set up, i choose Template option 2 ) Under Goal description, i choose Type > Destination 3 ) and finally, in Goal details field, destination   equals to    /thank-you-2/ But, no Goal is being tracked. In the first step, should i have selected  'Custom'  instead of 'Template' Thanks

    | Johnroger
    0
  • Johnroger


    Hello, I am a bit confused about the correct setting of filter to combine All facebook referrals into one.
    After going through different versions, not sure which one is correct and will work Some versions say that Search string should be -  *^.facebook.com$ and Replace string should be -  facebook.com While according to other Search string should be >   *.facebook
    and Replace string should be -  facebook Please guide which one of this is correct and will work ? Thanks

    | Johnroger
    0
  • Johnroger


    Hello MOZ Community, The website in question is https://x-y.com/ When i looked at the landing pages report in GA , x-y.com is appended at the end of every URL like this. https://x-y.com/x-y.com When i open the above URL in GA interface, it shows page not found. This is obvious as there is no such URL.
    The metrics like sessions, Users, Bounce rate all look good. In the property settings, The default URL is written like this http:// cell-gate.com (Please note that s is missing in property settings). But how is traffic tracked correctly How do i solve this problem. What settings should we change to make the landing pages report look ok Thanks

    | Johnroger
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  • RWesley


    Hey Mozzers, I'm seeing more 'New users' than 'Users' in Google Analytics (see screenshot). This is over a 3 year time period. Any idea why new users would be greater than users? Thanks! 6lYmU0j

    | RWesley
    0
  • hlwebdev


    All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events. The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs. What are best practices in this area? To index or not? What do you / your clients do and why? Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)

    | hlwebdev
    1
  • Cfarcher


    We have a newspaper source that links to a domain that forwards to a page on our website. Do we get link juice from that? Go here: https://dailygazette.com/  click on "Classifieds" then "CapRegion Homes" the button goes to the website www.capregionhomes.com which forwards to our main website, a page we built for them. My question is: Because the link from this site first goes to another site that auto-forwards to us are we actually getting any link juice from the daily gazette on this or is that first site getting all the juice & we technically are getting link juice from capregionhomes.com ?

    | Cfarcher
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  • RoxBrock


    Because of the tools my company is using for CI/CD (A CI/CD pipeline helps you automate steps in your software delivery process, such as initiating code builds, running automated tests, and deploying to a staging or production environment.) an extra URL is generated. The canonical for the generated site is that of our main website, but other than that it is the same website. Could this new URL compete with our website? Will Google count it against us since it is the same content BUT with canonical (it is not noindex-ed)? Does it matter? Surely others are using this method? Answers/thoughts will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

    | RoxBrock
    0
  • BethA


    I have a multitude of "schedule a demo" pages/forms on my site that are all identical, so I have on all of them.  My question is, should I also place on the link to the "schedule a demo" pages? I know the generic rule is to never nofollow any internal links (per Matt Cutts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY), but should that still apply if the link directs to a page that is noindex, nofollow? Thanks for your input in advance; don't want to run into, as Matt Cutts puts it, "a mini kerfuffle!"

    | BethA
    0
  • AndyRCWRCM


    Hi Everyone, Is there a tool that can change the phone number on a web page based on the visitor source (i.e., direct, organic, paid, etc.)? I'd like to implement a solution like this with different call tracking numbers based on the visitor source.  We use the Google suite for our analytics (GA, GTM, Google Data Studio, Google Optimize is also an option as well). - Also, is there a good call tracking service that will ping a URL each time the phone number is called so that we can track these calls as events in GA? The majority of our visitors use a desktop PC and dial in the number on the screen rather than clicking (tapping) on it from a mobile device. Thanks, Andy

    | AndyRCWRCM
    0
  • Alces


    I'm working with a client that has a number of paths for users to take (demand vs. supply, a lot of variables, etc). All involve new URLs and are perfect for destination-based goals and thus the creation of funnels; however, right now most are irrelevant due to some issues involving redirects, changed paths, etc. In the process of trying to make sense of them, I discovered that the site forces you to make an account before proceeding through the steps in the funnel. Are there any resources that might indicate the best to approach situations like this - that is, account creation at the beginning (and as a requirement before proceeding) to creating an account at the end? I'm trying to make sense of all their potential paths, but it's impossible without making countless accounts. Thanks.

    | Alces
    0
  • HTXSEO


    We think we get link equity from some large travel domains to white label versions of our main website. These pages are noindex because they're the same URLs and content as our main B2C website and have canonicals to the pages we want indexed. Question is, is there REALLY link equity to pages on our domain which have "noindex,nofollow" on them? Secondly we're looking to put all these white label pages on a separate structure, to better protect our main indexed pages from duplicate content risks. The best bet would be to put them on a sub folder rather than a subdomain, yes? That way, even though the pages are still noindex, we'd get link equity from these big domains to www.ourdomain.com/subfolder where we wouldn't to subdomain.ourdomain.com? Thank you!

    | HTXSEO
    0
  • 1001mp3


    hi guys i have a Keyword Cannibalization isuue, please Introduce best free tools for  checking Keyword Cannibalization.

    | 1001mp3
    0
  • Ty1986


    Hi mozzers, We just learned that our standard GA hasn't been as reliable as we hoped so and we are trying to find other ways to track organic sessions. Which solution would you consider? Is Segment one of them? If so, is it more reliable than Google Analytics? Thanks

    | Ty1986
    1
  • SearchStan


    I'm having confusion about where I would add the the Enhanced Ecommerce line of code: ga(‘require’, ‘ec’); if I have Analytics implemented through Google Tag Manager? I have read through several articles and still am not entirely sure.

    | SearchStan
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hi Mozzers, Under Mobile Usability, in Google Search Console, I am seeing very few website pages getting analysed - 10 out of 40 static pages, on the website in question. Is this to be expected or does this indicated an indexing problem on mobile?

    | McTaggart
    0
  • Marketing_Optimist


    I've just taken on a new client and on first look at their Google Analytics they are getting a bounce rate between 7% and 0%. Frankly I'm amazed if this is correct as between 1 April 2017 and 21 June 2017 they've driven 6403 session to the site from a range of referrers as well as AdWords (which has a 0% bounce rate), so traffic is pretty good. I've never seen such a low bounce rate which is making me suspicious, what can I do to check it's all recording properly? Any other ideas or have I found a near perfect site in terms of bounce? The url is http://knuma.co.uk/

    | Marketing_Optimist
    1
  • Pintapin


    When I search my keyword on google I can see my website, but when I connect to a VPN and again search it, I'm not in the search result, what happens on my website?

    | Pintapin
    0
  • Mr.Suren


    Hi, I have a WordPress site (woocommerce integrated). I would like to know should I use a plugin to enable e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics or I should do it manually with GTM. Which is a better way? Will using a plugin to enable e-commerce tracking slow down my site? Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

    | Mr.Suren
    0
  • eGInnovations


    This week we did two big email sends from completely separate sources and separate lists. However, in GA I see spam traffic coming from the same city and the same service provider when I look at the report for each source. Screenshots attached. I'm hoping someone can help me understand what I'm looking at and what I should do in the future to prevent. Thanks! g9NTZ5z X5WhYnf

    | eGInnovations
    0
  • Sodimaccl


    Hello, When I want to "Explore by site" and make a "Site overview", I have only 4 choices for the region : USA United Kingdom Canada Australia But the location of my business is in Chile.
    Does this have any repercussion or negative impact in the analytics ? Thank you.

    | Sodimaccl
    0
  • jandk4014


    We are a electronic hardware manufacture with a fairly large catalog of products.  I dynamically built our site and we have over 705,000 unique products that we can offer.  With our php framework I was able to create sitemaps that hold every product unique url.  After doing all of that I submitted our data to Google. Then waited with a cocktail encouraged that we'd grow up the ranks of Google organically.  Well, that didn't happen. Besides several other problems (lack of overall unique content, appearance of duplicate content, no meta description, no unique page titles, poor use of heading tags and no rel canonical tags) how can I get a "do-over" with Google and my submitted sitemaps?  Can they be re-submitted?  Can they even be deleted?

    | jandk4014
    0
  • Reema24


    Search Console is giving this issue for near 100 pages of my website. I have checked the Yoast plugin settings. We haven't used any meta robots tag for these pages, neither have these pages been disallowed in robots.txt. Previosuly this issue was for some 20+ pages. I tried to reindex them by submitting the urls again. Now the count has risen to 100+. There is also this "Submitted URL blocked by robots.txt" issue for pages which are NOT disallowed in robots.txt. Can anyone please suggest me a solution here?

    | Reema24
    0
  • conversal


    As marketing agency we have for each client an analytics account. This means that we have more than 100 analytics accounts. Because there is a limit of 100 analytics accounts (free version), we have created multiple accounts that own different analytics accounts of our clients. Is it possible to use x@conversal.be and add it to each of our multiple analytics accounts as manager or is there a limit too? In other words, how many accounts can you manage as 'manager'?

    | conversal
    1
  • Justine.Hedge


    We noticed a huge spike in traffic this past Sunday and after some digging in our Analytics account, we saw that it was coming from kazooisyee (under the Network tab). This traffic had almost a 100% bounce rate and they spent an average of less than a second on our site. Does anyone know what this might be associated to? Is this one of those SEO site analysis sites? Any information on this will help a ton as my employer is rather concerned about this at the moment. Thanks!

    | Justine.Hedge
    0
  • akin67


    For the last 4 hours of so we were registering zero users and Adsense reporting has not changed. We checked the site, and there were no problems. It seems for some reason there was no reporting. Just now it came back up and we are showing live traffic. Trying to figure out if this was a problem specific to us or if it is on Google's end. Thanks,

    | akin67
    0
  • madegood


    Hi, I'm getting these weird phantom search results showing up in my analytics account which is skewing  my results. I have a wordpress site, and I do have some custom search results pages, but analytics is telling me these hits are coming from google- which I doubt. The end of the query string (&cat=plus-5-results) is not coming from a link created within my site. Anyone have any ideas? Failing that, would somebody be kind enough to explain how I can ignore these hits, but retain other, valid search result requests? Thanks reading! Will Screenshot%202019-05-16%20at%2022.32.10.jpg

    | madegood
    0
  • monique-plaw


    Our company is a full service law firm with a main website and 6 microsites relevant to each practise area. Over the last 2 years, we have had significant traffic growth and ranked well in SERP, conversions were good and everything was tracking along nicely. Come January 2019, the traffic on 2 of our microsites have dropped by 20% and is not recovering. We have done a site audit and there are no issues with the website, we are still ranking #1 in SERP for our targeted search terms but the traffic just isn't there. Has anyone else with legal websites had this issue or can provide insight into the drop in traffic? It just doesn't make sense why all of a sudden the traffic isn't there anymore. Any advice on what other actions we can take to try and find the issue would be appreciated.

    | monique-plaw
    0
  • amanda_feagle


    I am noticing a decline in the number of our linking domains and inbound links from month to month. It isn't drastic but looking like a trend. Any reason why this would happen? I'm not sure where to start. Thanks!

    | amanda_feagle
    0
  • JabeKay


    Hi, This is a technical question. OK, two technical questions. Please bear with me and I'll do my best to explain... We have a WordPress blog (business account, hosted by WordPress). We use it to blog and send traffic to our separate e-commerce site. We use UTM tracking to see which blog posts perform best. Our e-commerce site has a high domain authority. Our blog, not so much. In an effort to increase the domain authority of the blog we have mapped a subdomain of the e-commerce site to the Wordpress blog (still hosted by WordPress). Q1. Will this actually raise the blog's DA? If the blog does get a DA boost, I guess it'll be because Google now sees it as part of a powerful domain. But if it is technically part of the powerful domain... Q2. Should we remove the UTM parameters from the blog? I've read that you should never use UTM on internal links because it messes with your Google Analytics data. But I'm unsure if links on a mapped subdomain count as 'internal links'. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks in advance. J

    | JabeKay
    0
  • MainstreamMktg


    Hello All, Has anyone come across the following message "Not enough data for selected time period" when they choose a time frame in Google My Business (GMB) for one week. It seems to be consistent with  "Customer Actions" and "Where Customers View Your Business on Google sections. I'm confused because I am pulling in a minimum of 500 searches a week according to the "How customers search for your business" section. I can scroll over top of each day in these areas and manually write down the results, but what's the point of offering a 'one week" insight if it won't calculate for you. If anyone has had the same issue or knows what's going on, please let me know. Thanks!

    | MainstreamMktg
    1
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi I've just had best practice site migration completed for my old e-commerce store into a Shopify environment and I see in GSC that it's reporting my standard pages as blocked by robots.txt, such as these below examples. Surely I don't want these blocked ? is that likely due to my migrators or s defaults setting with Shopify does anyone know? : t&c's shipping policy pricing policy privacy policy etc So in summary: Shall I unblock these? What caused it Shopify default settings or more likely my migration team? All Best Dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • HashtagHustler


    So, i have done some research on this and I am running into 2 problems. We run a review site for a specific niche. wordpress is viewing our category pages as an "archive" which i don't know that it really is. Google seems to only be indexing the first 9 pages of this category. We would like google to be indexing these pages because thats the only place on our website where all our specific products are linked. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

    | HashtagHustler
    1
  • TukTown


    Hi all! This is a weird one that I've never encountered before. So basically, an admin granted me search console access as an "owner" to the site in search console, and everything worked fine. I inspected some URL's with the new tool and had access to everything. Then, when I realized I had to remove certain pages from the index it directed me to the old search console, as there's no tool for that yet in the new version. However, the old version doesn't even list the site under the "property" dropdown as either verified or unverified, and if I try to add it it makes me undergo the verification process, which fails (I also have analytics and GTM access, so verification shouldn't fail). Has anyone experienced something similar or have any ideas for a fix? Thanks so much for any help!

    | TukTown
    1
  • CJolicoeur


    Hello, We have 7 sites and have noticed that for one site, we don't see any backlink info in Search Console even if it's been linked for over 8 months. Other tools show thousands of backlinks, but Search Console is still pending. I also see very little info in regards to Performance even if we are getting thousands of hits a day. Could this be a sign of a bigger problem? In summary, the site is up and running, getting hits, getting backlinks, but Search Console still looks like it's a new site with no activity several months after being installed.

    | CJolicoeur
    0
  • Kickboard


    I've been doing a lot research on GDPR impact and implementation with GTM-GA for clients, but it's been 12 months since GDPR has gone live I haven't found anything on how GA traffic has been impacted if users don't accept cookie consent. However, I'm personally seeing GA accounts taking huge losses in traffic since implementing GDPR cookie solutions (because GTM/GA tags aren't firing until cookies are accepted). Is it common for websites to see significant decreases in traffic due to too many users not accepting cookie consent? Are there alternative solutions to avoid traffic loss like that and still maintain GDPR compliance? It seems to me that the industry underestimated how many people won't accept cookie consent. Most of the documentation and articles around GDPR's start (May 2018) didn't foresee or cover that aspect properly, everything seems to be technically focused with the assumption that if implemented properly most people would accept cookie consent, but I'm personally not seeing that trend and it's destroying GA data (lost traffic, minimal source attribution, inaccurate behavior data, etc). Thanks.

    | Kickboard
    2
  • dpsoftware


    Is the meta meta referrer tag still used and is it affective. I have an issue with traffic going from one of my sites to a client site and our referral is going into their direct traffic (in Googel Analytics) instead of being seen as a referral from our site. I saw that people were using the meta referral tag, but I can't find any MOZ info about it other than a blog article from 2015.

    | dpsoftware
    1
  • RoniFaida


    I have a small health & fitness blog, and my Google search traffic suddenly dropped 60% around August 1 (I've attempted to link an image). My rank has dropped for 86 keywords. I have no manual penalty, so I'm guessing I was affected by the algorithm change. My technical skills are VERY limited. I've tried to find answers on my own, but every time I try to "fix" something, I only seem to make it worse. I do seem to have some structural/performance issues with my site (e.g., lots of 404 errors from uninstalled plugins and unwanted permalinks). I asked my server for assistance (I used managed Wordpress hosting), and they said they couldn't help. As you can imagine, this is quite devastating, and I have no clue where to go from here. I don't know if I'm allowed to link to my site here, but it's mommyrunsit dot com. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks. Sharon 0lPu4wY

    | RoniFaida
    1
  • CatdiPrinting


    So what a morning.... Did a search for our website and looked to see how we were doing with a couple of search terms and it turns out our website is GONE. I mean not a slap down or fluctuations in positioning but we are literal gone. I see that the contact page is pulls up on page 8 but effectively we dont exist. This is so odd and strange that i feel that this is a dream. The fact that we dont pull up on any search terms anymore is of a concern that this is something more than a penalty. What on Earth could have caused this? This is fluke? Can i call Google? Seems that index page has been removed from the search results Website www.catdi.com Catdi Printing Search Terms Houston Printing Houston Direct Mail EDDM Printing EDDM Help! C

    | CatdiPrinting
    0
  • Mat_C


    Hi, We are setting up the URL structure for a big webshop and this raised the following questions regarding the URL's for products that belong to several categories (most of the products do, so the same approach would be used for products that just belong to one category). There are three options in my point of view: Use root-level product page URLs (limits trackability in Analytics software because you can not specify on product types)
    URL: example.com/product-1/ Use product type URL directories for all products (which at least offers minimum trackability of all separate product types in Analytics software)
    URL: example.com/book/product-1/ Use product URLs built upon category URL structures, but ensure that each product page URL has a single, designated canonical URL.
    URL: example.com/category-A/product-1/ with canonical= example.com/category-A/product-1/ URL: example.com/category-B/product-1/ with canonical= example.com/category-A/product-1/ Which option is the preferred one? Thanks!

    | Mat_C
    0
  • cPanel-LLC.


    Hi there, We recently changed our domain from .COM to .NET so that all our subdomains from external pages matched. Right now in Google Console we have our new .NET website being tracked, but in GA we are still tracking .COM. It is also causing issues with MOZ crawling our site because of the .COM/.NET discrepancy. My question is what is the best way to change our Google Analytics from .COM to .NET without losing historical data and what considerations do we need to change before implementing this? Our team was concerned that just downloading the old data would be too vast and it we wouldn't be able to continue manipulating it dynamically in GA. Thanks!!

    | cPanel-LLC.
    0
  • marshdigitalmarketing


    For the longest time, our company policy has always been to put PDFs in a secure folder (hence they are not indexed and do not appear in search results). After evaluating this strategy, there has been clamor in recent months to allow Google to index our whitepapers. My question: Once PDFs start appearing in search results, what is the best way to start tracking clicks due to these "downloads"?

    | marshdigitalmarketing
    0
  • filip-balun


    Hi everyone, I found this 'anomaly' in my google search console data. As you can see from the picture the impressions skyrocketed in a few days and then sort-of plateaued. The clicks remained almost the same because the keyword is highly informational (Wikipedia takes all the traffic). The keyword has around 650 000 searches per month. Btw. We are not doing off-site SEO. I would like to hear your opinion on what could have caused this. A Google update maybe? 5lERKef

    | filip-balun
    1
  • Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine


    There must be an easy answer to this, but I can't seem to find it. All I want to do is create a segment in Google Analytics that shows all pages and search strings with "orthopaedics" in the title, with pageviews, uniques etc. If I simply navigate to "All Pages" in Google Analytics and then click Advanced Filters and do an Include Page Contains "orthopaedics" it works just fine. (See attached Screen Shot) But when I try to recreate this as a segment, it pulls in all other pages the users visited before arriving on the orthopaedics page I want to include, which I don't want. I can manually exclude each URL I don't want, but this is tedious and I feel there must be a simpler method I'm just missing. At the end of the day, I'm trying to create a list of every page and dynamically created query string that includes the word "orthopaedics" to say doctor X, your orthopaedics section generated X views, and here's a list of the pages. Mm6YTKa

    | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine
    0
  • Julia_a1a


    I have had a huge increase in direct traffic to our website but not sure why this suddenly happened? (no promos during this time period), traffic up 200%+ according to Google Analytics

    | Julia_a1a
    1
  • HashtagHustler


    We are at a loss. We have been following Google Pagespeed Insights which gives us horrible marks. Nothing we do seems to really make a difference. GTMetrix and Pingdom give us much better scores. We don't know what to do...

    | HashtagHustler
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    When i look in GA under Channels (under Acquisition) 'other' is listed What is 'other' ? I have been told its other unidentified channels as they did not allow 3rd party cookies or surfers were in anonymous/private mode.   Other is usually organic traffic that couldn't be identified for the aformentioned reasons. This data is encrypted and available but it violates Google guidelines as they are not allowed to pass personal info//data to third parties so it is automatically filtered. But they are not 'Not Provided' (since that still shows under organic) but is usually/mainly some form of organic visits. Hence Seo can take credit for much of that traffic, is this correct ? Many Thanks

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

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