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How to Build an Advanced Keyword Analysis Report in Excel

Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review. With keyword metrics coming from all over the place (Analytics, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc.), it’s challenging to analyze all the data in one place regularly without having to do a decent amount of manual data manipulation. In addition, dependent on your site’s business model, tying revenue metrics to keyword data is a whole other battle.

This post will walk you through a solution to these keyword analysis issues and provide some tips on how you can slice and dice your data in wonderful ways.

With Microsoft Excel, we can create a report with all the keyword data you will need, all in one place, and fairly easy to update on a weekly or monthly basis. Then with all this data we can easily categorize segments of it to more quickly determine the better performing sets of keywords.

What we will need to do is push Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Adwords, Ranking data, and Revenue data all into one excel spreadsheet. Then we will put it all together into one master report and one categorized pivot table report.

To start, you should be especially familiar with pivot tables, the Google Adwords API, the Google Analytics API, and keyword research of course. Utilizing these APIs and being consistent in the formatting of the data you put into your spreadsheet will make it easy to update. If you aren’t familiar with these tools, I have provided resources below and some steps to organizing this data.

Here are some resources for learning to use pivot tables in Excel:

Excel for SEO
Microsoft Pivot Table Overview

Now let’s go fetch that data.

I Got 99 Problems, But A Keyword Visit Ain't One

First off we need to get our keyword traffic metrics through the Google Analytics API. I suggest using Mikael Thuneberg’s GA Data Fetch spreadsheet. You can follow the instructions, read the how to guide, and download the file here.

Make sure to build off the GA data fetch file or a copy of it, as it has the proper VBA functions (the Visual Basic code that allows for the API to work) installed for API calls. Once you have your API token and the spreadsheet setup you can perform your first API call.

We will be using the more complex query to extract organic keyword visits for a specific date field and filter by the number of visits. The query I use for example, will output visits, average time on site, page views, and bounces for any keyword with 5 or more visits in the last 30 days. However, you can modify the parameters to your liking. To see what other metrics can be used, check out the Analytics API documentation.

Your Analytics data should look something like this:

Google Analytics data called through the API in Excel.

Now select the whole keyword column and create a pivot table of the keyword list in another sheet. In the adjacent column create a table where the cells equal the values in the pivot table column. Label this table “KeywordList” or whatever you like. We now have the keyword table to reference for extracting Adwords data.

Keyword Lists and Tables

Pivot tables don’t have the same referencing abilities as regular tables, so the table in column B is what you will reference in future steps.

To Be, Or Not To Be Searched, That Is The Question

Next up is pulling in search volumes for our keyword table. Thanks to the wonderful Richard Baxter, there are a couple articles on using and installing the Adwords API Plugin. One on SEOmoz and one on Seogadget.

I know the Adwords API access is a bit of an issue for some, so if you cannot use the API, utilize the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (gathering data from this tool will unfortunately require a lot more work).

In a new sheet, use the Adwords API array formula called “arrayGetAdWordsStats” to pull in the average and seasonal monthly search volumes for your keyword table. Your formula should look something like this:

=arrayGetAdWordsStats(KeywordList,”EXACT”,”US”,”WEB”)

You should now have 12 months of historical search volumes and averages for all your keywords.

Results from an Adwords API call usually look like this.

Note: If your keyword list is greater than 800 keywords, you will have to break out the list into a few separate tables just to perform API calls for those keywords. If this is the case, make sure to keep each array of search volumes aligned in the same columns.

The Impression That I Get

No API required here, Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a pretty easy way to download its search query data. If you open up the Search Queries report in Webmaster Tools there is an option to “download the table” at the bottom. Download the table for the same date range you used earlier and drop it into a new sheet.

The report downloaded from Webmaster Tools. Note the “-“ is used for zero values, in the yellow columns I simply cleaned that up with an IF statement.

Impressions, CTR, and Average Rank can now been added to our metrics.

If You Ain't First Page, You're Last

Since we all know how accurate average rank is from Webmaster Tools, let’s get some current rankings into this report .Grab your main keyword list from the spreadsheet and run rankings for them with your application of choice. I usually use Rank Tracker, but I am sure everyone has their own preference. Once you have your rankings drop it into a new sheet.

The More You Know

The number of metrics we can add to the report are limitless, but there comes a point where adding too many can create more work for updating the report or create analysis paralysis. The only other metric I suggest adding in is the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty if you have a PRO account. Again this may be very time consuming to add for large numbers of keywords, hopefully you have an intern for that.

Mo Money Mo Metrics

Revenue data may come from different places dependent on how your business works, so I unfortunately don’t have a one stop solution to importing that data. However, most applications usually allow you to download that data to CSV or Excel. If you have Ecommerce enabled in Google Analytics, you can use the API to pull in this data. As long as you have some metrics to relate to your keyword such as Average Order Value or Conversion Rate, drop it in a new sheet and you will be good to go.

Some of you may be asking yourself what to do if your revenue data does not tie back to the keyword visit. This is where the categorization of keywords plays an extremely important part in this report. In this case, we want to create a bridge between the revenue data and keyword data. This can be done through categorizing your keywords into a category that relates back to a field in your revenue data. For example, you might be able to associate keywords with product names or landing pages. These products or landing pages would then become categories. Once you have determined what your categories will be, you can assign them to keywords in a new sheet that simply contains keywords in one column and the category tag in the other. You can learn more about keyword categorization here.

Categorizing the keywords above not only lets me group them to aggregate metrics for analysis, but it allows me to bridge the gap somewhat between the keywords and conversions in this example.

One Report To Rule Them All

Finally we have all the data; we just have to put it all together. Create a new sheet and pull in your master keyword list by using =NameOfTheTable, drag this down until you reach the last keyword on the list (paste values after if you want sorting capabilities). Now select your keywords and create a new table. In the columns next to the keywords all you have to do is a VLOOKUP of each metric you would like to add to your report. Once you fill in the first cell of each column, the column should automatically be added to the table and populate the other cells with the equation. Repeat this process until all your metrics are in this table.

There will also be a need to calculate some metrics such as the Bounce Rate or Conversion Rate if you pulled in revenue data. Those should be added in adjacent columns as well. Additionally, if you didn’t need to categorize your keywords earlier, I suggest categorizing them now in an adjacent column. When completed your master report should look something like this:

The master report.

Amazing. We have all the data in one place in a simple to sort and use table! Just wait…it gets better.

Pivotal Success

Now you may be wondering how this report can get any better. Two words my friends: Pivot Tables.

Creating a pivot table of your master report will allow you to segment your data in a number of ways that weren’t possible before. In the Pivot Table Field List, the Row Labels, Column Labels, and Values will define the layout of your report. What we first need to do is drag and drop the Category and Keyword fields into the Row Labels respectively. This will set your top level metrics to summarize at the Category level and allow you to drill down into each Category to see the associated keywords and their individual metrics.

Next you will want to start dragging your metrics into the Values section, which will automatically populate the Column Labels section with the Values field. As you add your metrics in, you can edit their names and the way they are aggregated. You will want to think carefully about how you will aggregate certain metrics so that viewing those summarized numbers at a Category level makes sense.

Pivot Table Fields

This shows you how best to setup your pivot table fields and their value settings.

For instance, I might summarize Impressions and Visits, but average CTR and Bounce Rate. Seeing the average CTR and Bounce Rate for a Category will allow me to narrow down which sets of keywords are performing better than others. Then looking at the total Impressions and Visits for those well performing categories will allow me to see where there might be a higher potential to increase traffic to my site. While this may not be an absolute rule to determine keyword focus, it is a good rule of thumb and can be a way to prioritize which ones to focus on.

Pivot table reports also allow you to add report filters, letting you filter out data by any metric or even multiple metrics. With this you could analyze keywords that only rank on the first page of SERPs using the current ranking as a filter. Hell, you could add a field to the master report calculating the number of words in each keyword phrase, then filter by that and bounce rate, giving you your well performing long tail keywords. Get creative, let loose, play with the metrics, you will be surprised at what kind of conclusions you can make about your site’s keyword traffic.

The final product.

Conclusion

Updating the report is simple. Rerun the API calls with the new date range, rerun your rankings for the new keyword list, and export the other reports you need with new date range. As long as you kept your formatting and equations the same, the rankings and other reports should be dropped into their respective sheets without having to change anything. The master report should automatically be updated once you update the keyword column and the pivot report should update once you hit refresh under the pivot table menu. That’s it!

Well I should probably stop talking now and let you get to your hours upon hours of keyword analysis fun. Hopefully this was informative enough to make building a report such as this fairly easy. I would love to hear your feedback and will gladly answer any questions or comments about the post below. If you have issues later on, you can always contact me via Twitter.

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How to Turn Your Content into Link Bait

Posted by Brian Flores

In late December of 2011, HTML5 cheat sheets, which we originally created for WebDesignLedger (WDL), were shared by Google on their Google Developers profile. WDL has 74k+ Twitter followers. Google Developers has 65k+ users in their circles. Together, their promotion increased our referral traffic for that day by 300%. Since then, we’ve experienced a steady stream of traffic and incoming back links. This was definitely a link bait win for us.

I want to share with you how I turn content like our HTML5 cheat sheets into link bait. It’s a straightforward process and a model to emulate for anyone that’s aspiring to land some pretty sticky web content of their own.

The Brainstorming Session

Inviting creative outside-the-box thinkers as well as pragmatists to the brainstorming pow wow can help you come up with more exciting content ideas and effective ways to getting it pushed to the right audiences.

Don’t feel like you have to recreate the wheel every time. If you’re running out of new content ideas, try revisiting infographics that you tweeted in the past, articles you bookmarked, free tools, widgets you built, etc. and see if you can improve them in a valuable way.

Actually, the HTML5 cheat sheets are a perfect example of improving something already created. The idea started when a coworker forwarded me an HTML5 article that contained a wonderful cheat sheet. It had useful information and a great design, but I thought it could be more comprehensive and print-friendly.

A light went on in my head! What about creating a comprehensive cheat sheet that is print and web-friendly! Our graphic designer did some research and discovered that other cheat sheets tried to accomplish these objectives but with little success. We were definitely onto something. Now we just needed to develop it!

Developing Valuable Content

Before creating content, take time to really examine why your content is going to be valuable. This preliminary step provides better focus and direction during the content development stage.

Personally, the HTML5 cheat sheet is an instance of learning this lesson the hard way. I knew I wanted it to be comprehensive, print/web-friendly but I focused too much on its layout and design. I neglected to consider logistical elements such as background color, dimensions, if the graphic was proportionally correct, etc.

The first draft of the cheat sheet that I received from our graphic designer had a clean design and a robust color scheme, but it still had some major issues. For starters, it had too much information on it, which led to barely readable text. Its black background drained our printer of ink. The cheat sheets also became distorted when printed on certain paper sizes. I could already foresee the criticism coming from web developers and designers.

We couldn’t go live with this version of the HTML5 sheet and needed to drastically overhaul its design. The background color was an easy fix but organizing all of its information was going to take some time. Our graphic designer laid out some ideas. However, we still couldn’t get all the content to fit properly.

In the end, we decided that we would divide the cheat sheets into three parts, which could easily be printed on legal paper or larger. It turned out to be a good decision, but it definitely taught me the importance of taking some time before developing content to deeply examining why and how content is going to be valuable and well-received.

Know Who You’re Writing For

Try to familiarize yourself with the guidelines set by a publisher before creating content. Almost every popular and highly authoritative website has a particular tone, scope of topics, amount of words, limitations on self-promotion, etc. that must be maintained. Trust me, it's never fun "completing" an article only to find out that an editor won't publish it until it meets their standards.

With all said, sometimes good content is good content. If you have fantastic content in your possession and you're absolutely certain that you don't want to change it to meet a publisher's standards, then consider publishing the content as is on your website and finding the right promoter to direct traffic to it. I'll discuss this part later.

Lastly, make sure your content is factually correct, lacks grammar and spelling errors, coded correctly (if it's interactive content), and of course has a well-polished design.

Finding the Right Publishers and Influencers

Your content is only as good as who's publishing and promoting it. Many link builders often choose not to concern themselves with critical relationships that go into creating link bait. This only hurts your chances of gaining plenty of social mentions and new linking opportunities.

To exact a list of potential publishers, I regularly use Google search operators like the following:

[industry] + intext:write for us
[industry] + inurl:”write-for-us”
[intitle:industry] + inurl:”contact-us”

Here are some great resources for learning about other search operators:

Search Operators to find Web Design Blogs
These days, publishers and social influencers are communicating more than ever on Twitter/Google+, perhaps because these two social networks are valuable tools for communicating with their followers. Typically, my first point of contact with a potential promoter of content is through a Tweet. Email addresses are important, too, but they serve a different purpose. I'll explain that later.

If I need to get in contact with a potential promoter of my content (especially one with a substantial social media presence), I make it a priority to find their company Twitter handle and their Google+ profile, and any of their colleagues. I recommend that you do the same. Definitely engage with them, add them to your circles, retweet their content, +1 it -- bottom line, get them familiar with you.

Ask for their personal contact information once you've developed a good rapport and feel comfortable asking them to review your content. Many content editors are pressured to produce/post a certain amount of content per week or month, so checking out your content is something they most likely will consider. If they pass on your content, ask them if they could forward you to other websites/influencers that might want to publish it.

After a publisher agrees to move forward with posting your content, I’d check the following to ensure that your content has a real shot at becoming link bait:

Your content has optimized title tags, H1s and H2s, URLs, meta descriptions, alt image tags, link attributes, page load times, etc.
Ask if it’s possible to publish your content on a day that receives the most traffic. Mondays and Tuesdays are usually those days.
See if the publisher will provide a list of followers/fellow publishers who might want to promote your content to their followers as well.
If possible, host the content on your website and have the promoter write a blog post that directs traffic to you.
Make sure your web hosting plan can handle an uptick in traffic and resources.
Be patient and flexible with publishers especially if it’s your first time working with them. If you’re easy to work with, publishers usually like to make sure your content launches without a hitch.
Confirm the publication date and time of article. I’ve actually missed perfect link bait opportunities because I wasn’t told by a publisher that the content was already posted.
Check to if publisher will allow HTML code that can be copied and pasted for easy sharing.
Include a branded logo on infographics/images as well as any sources you used.

Tracking and Monitoring Social Media Buzz

Now the fun part, broadcasting and monitoring the buzz that's stirring around in your industry. Determine which conversations you want to insert yourself into to widen your reach. Here's your chance to go hash tag crazy. I strongly recommend using these social media tips:

Follow, publicly list or ‘circle’ influential people who retweeted your content and the people they follow.
Send personalized tweets/direct messages to potentially good promoters to avoid sounding like spam.
Tagging people is absolutely important to being seen and tracking on Google+, so definitely incorporate ‘+’ or ‘@’ signs when promoting your content to possible promoters.
If possible, avoid using URL shorteners and make sure your URLs are descriptive. This is not only for branding purposes, it also helps build trust with people.

Tying it All Together

As you should have caught on to by now, creating link bait is a basic yet very involved process. Each component of the process has several large and small factors that can ultimately impact your content's chances of becoming legitimate link bait. This is the process that has provided me the most success; it certainly attracted Google Developers' team. I hope the information I shared helps you land sticky web content of your own on the web, or at the very least, sparks a discussion of other link builders best practices.

Is Charity an Impulse Purchase?

Posted by Todd Bailey

Some aspects of marketing seem intuitive, yet after time passes, the reality of data collection sets in. Such is the apparent case regarding the donations-through-text process. An online post revisits the altruistic sentiments relayed by those who donated to Haiti after the destructive earthquake of two years ago.

The report offers some disconcerting news for the Red Cross and other bastions of goodwill, hoping to recruit more funds through the texts of donors. Initially the text-to-give sentiment seemed successful; about $43 million was raised via 4.3 million text donations, many donors doing so immediately or soon following the prompt to give.

Those numbers were impressive. It's no wonder the text-to-give process was repeated, yet not reproducing such altruistic numbers. The American Red Cross garnered $30 million via texts for Haiti, but when trying to replicate efforts for Japan ($1.2 million) and domestic tornado relief last year ($1.2 million) the texting channel did not run as plentiful.

What's a bit more worthy of head scratching is the tenacity of the donors. Of those who gave and were surveyed, more than half reported dedicating little to no interest to recovery efforts thereafter, as if the donation was somewhat of an "impulse" purchase. In addition, only two in five surveyed, who previously gave to Haiti, gave support after the Japanese tsunami, disrupting the hopes of goodwill sources, who were hoping to "target" donors or somehow define a targeted "market" of donors.

More bad news for forming an ostensible target market:

More than 80% who gave to Haiti initially via text, gave no other way thereafter
Only one-third who gave to Haiti, did so more than once (text contributions were limited to $10 per text)

Smart phone usage is booming and connecting with users is highly championed in the online marketing world, but text-to-give does not seem to have the viral inertia showcased through Haiti's relief. What gives? Tim Ogden, a Philanthropy Action blogger, offers, "This very much reinforces that if a charity doesn’t have something to drive what is very much an impulse decision, then text-to-give is not a particularly valuable fund-raising tool.”

Suggestions and Questions:

It's difficult to assess why text-to-give efforts did not replicate the success it experienced with Haiti efforts. The tenaciously waning US economy could have been a factor as well as marketing efforts aligned with the text-to-give endeavor. What the report does not feature is the logistics of the efforts.

Did later efforts utilize social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook?
Did bastions of goodwill contact news sources, facilitating exposure of the text-to-give efforts?
Were official Web sites launched, using SEO efforts to boost search engine exposure and awareness?

It would be a fault to dismiss future efforts due to the weak traction of a couple following the Haiti attempts. Ogden made a good point; text-to-give (or any on or offline effort) does not guarantee results unless it is fueled by other on and offline marketing initiatives. Marketing and connecting with targets are ongoing processes, necessitating repetition and multiple on and offline platforms. Perhaps charities should contact experienced off and online marketers rather than bank on "impulse" decisions.

An Attempt To Build The Perfect Link Checker

Posted by Netvantage Marketing

Lesson #1: No Matter How Good Something Is I Want Something Better

Like most people who play in the broken link building space, I was overjoyed when I found the Check My Links extension for Google Chrome. jrcooper did an excellent write up on this extension a few months ago in the ol' Youmoz blog (find it here). It was lightning fast, remarkably simple and it even had a sort of sexy look to it. One thing I've learned throughout my life, however, is that I'm never satisfied, and the more I used this tool I found it lacking a few things that I felt I just had to have:

The ability to export to a .csv. Sometimes you're crawling through a bunch of pages and I just want to be able to pull down a list of what's dead without having to do any real manual labor.
The ability to see the number of links pointing to a single page and/or the entire domain that the broken link is on.
The ability to see if the domains the broken links were on are available and the ability to quickly buy them.

So of course I worked around these issues for a while but it always burned at me when I knew I could be more efficient if I could just get my tools to do what I wanted them to. So I sat down with our neighbors at Nicholas Creative (I am by no means a developer, nor is anyone else at Netvantage) and asked them if they could help build me my perfect backlink checker. They agreed, and after several rounds of iterations and some helpful feedback from beta testers (thanks to Gab from SEOROI, Ben at Ontolo and Garrett at Citation Labs for helping spread the word) we finally finished our first "tool" and have dubbed it Domain Hunter Plus.

Here's the lowdown:

Once installed you'll see the DHP logo in the upper right hand corner of Chrome.

domain hunter plus icon

Click on it and you'll have the option to scan your page - click Start Scan and let the magic begin!

Once your page is scanned, DHP will show you all the broken outbound links, tell you if the domain is available and show you the number of links pointing to the individual page and the domain according to the Linkscape API. Even better? Click on the numbers and it will open Open Site Explorer for your page or the whole domain! If you want to buy a domain, leave the check box filled in and click register and the domains will be in your cart in GoDaddy in a new tab. If you want to save the data for later just click export and all the data will be neatly bundled up into a .csv file for your later use.

domain hunter plus screen shot

Interested yet?

We're pretty excited about this tool and it definitely knocks a couple steps out of the typical process for broken link building. If you're interest is piqued, head on over to the Domain Hunter Plus website to try it out for yourself or learn a little more in the walk through video there. The Nicholas Creative Blog and the Netvantage Blog also have write ups, but you're probably better off just downloading it and using it so I won't waste your time with more links. Happy domain hunting and link building!

How to Determine Exactly Which Google Display Network Site Delivered a Conversion

Posted by petrosianii

Or How to Track the Original (or First) Referrer of a Conversion using Google Analytics

The purpose of this post is to answer one specific question: How to find out exactly which Google Adwords Display Network site was responsible for a conversion recorded in the Goal Funnel Visualization section in Google Analytics.

Now, I am sure there is more than one way to do this. I am sure there are cleaner, easier, simpler methods of doing this than my way. But as my Indian coding brothers like to say, "I didn't found one" - not one that worked consistently and under all cases, at least. Admittedly, this way is a bit complicated, consists of a lot of steps, and isn't all that intuitive. But it works. Our team spent two days researching, testing, tweaking, over many different test cases. So, we're confident it works and are excited to share it with you.

Can't You do This With Adwords Conversion Tracking?

Supposedly, you can do this with Adwords Conversion Tracking, as Brad Geddes explains here. However, we needed to do this for a client account, which complicates things. In order for Conversion Tracking to work, you have to be able to link your Adwords and Analytics accounts (I think). But you can only do this if the Adwords and Analytics account are under the same Google Account credentials .. or something. At any rate, we couldn't figure out how to do it this way. We are managing the client's Adwords campaign inside our own Adwords account, but the client is sharing the analytics data with us from inside their own Analytics account. So, linking the two - we couldn't figure out how to do that. (I don't even think it's possible when the Adwords and Analytics accounts have different usernames, but if someone else knows how, by all means, share!)

What You Will Need

The Filter Manager - You will need to create two custom filters which we will show you later.
Manual URL Tagging - with a slight modification
Javascripts mentioned below
A webserver to upload a .js file to be called remotely

The Steps

1. Add the GA Initial Referrer .js file to your webserver. You can find the script on our website here. (Note: Please ignore the other scripts and samples on this page; this is a testing page we use to house some coding we're working on). Kudos to John Henson at LunarMetrics, Brad at the ROI Revolution Blog, and Brian Clifton's first referrer tracking scripts. Scroll down to the section called "GA Initial Referrer Script". Copy this to a text file, rename the .txt extension to a .js extension, and upload to your webserver. Remember the path because you will need it later.

2. Add the GA Initial Referrer Script 2 .js script to the web pages you want to track. You can find the script on the same page as in # 1, in the section titled "GA Initial Referrer Script 2". Add this just above your existing Google Analytics tracking scripts, on all pages. You may even add this script on your confirmation pages as well. Your revised tracking script should look like this:

Google Analytics Tracking Script, Revised to Track Initial Referrer

Note that you will need change the path of the first line of <script src= ...> above to whatever path location and filename you established for your .js file. You will also need to add the profile UA ID you're tracking where it says UA-XXXXXX-X.

3. Create a filter to view the conversion referrer. The filter looks like this:

See Conversion Referrer URL Filter

What this fliter does is takes the value in utm_medium of a manually tagged URL and rewrites it to the utm_source value. Later on you will see why this filter is needed when we get down to how you're supposed to manually tag the URL. For ease of reading, the values for the above filter are

Filter Type: Custom -> Advanced
Field A: Campaign Medium -> ^(cpc|ppc)$
Field B: Referral -> ^https?://([^/]+)/
Output To: Campaign Source -> $B1
Field A required: Yes
Field B required: Yes
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

By the way, you can find the place in Google Analytics to create such a filter here. See the yellow highlighted section below:

Where to Create the Filter in Google Analytics

4. Create a second filter to view the full URL of the referrer. (GA out of the box doesn't show you the full URL). It looks like this:

See Full URL of Referrer Filter

For ease of reading, the values for the above filter are

Filter Type: Custom Filter
Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Referral (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: leave blank
Output To -> Constructor: User Defined $A1
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

5. Manually tag the URLs for your Display Network ads following this syntax:

http://gnosisarts.com/home/Free_Press_Releases-a?utm_source=&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=EP

Notice the orange highlighted section in the code above. Normally, you need to specify a value after the " = " sign for utm_source. However, for this case, you must leave the value blank. I am not sure why, but we noticed that, when you put in a value for "utm_source=", that value overrides everything else in the User Defined Value segment of your Analytics. We don't want this value to be hardcoded in there. Rather, we want it dynamically populated, as it were, from our customized tracking scripts.

Now you see the reason behind the first filter (number 3 above). Since we are rewriting the utm_medium to the utm_source value, we suspect that this is the reason we need to leave the "utm_source=" value as blank.

For example, when we put in "PRON3" as the value for "utm_source=", this is what we get in Analytics:

Manually Tagged URL with utm_source= specified

When we specified "utm_source=PRON3", this is what results. We get a (not set) for User Defined Value, when what we are really looking for is the original referrer URL.

But when we left "utm_source=" as blank, this is what we get (see lines numbers 7 and 8):

What it looks like when utm_source= isn't specified

Notice that we tried many different combinations and permutations of this (lines 1 - 6 and 9-10). All other versions of the manually tagged URL produced a "(not set)" in the User Defined Value.

Putting it All Together

What line 7 in the picture above tells us is that a person started off at a Display Network Placement of "http://www.pressreleasesonline.net/2011/ ..." and ended up at our conversion confirmation page (http://gnosisarts.com/home/Thank-You3.html). Google Analytics now shows us the full referrer URL of any content network placement that delivers a conversion! This is valuable because it gives us another way to see which content network sites are producing conversions and which aren't. We no longer have to just rely on the CTR of the Content Network placement to evaluate that placement's worth to our campaign.

Now, we do not know which of the elements mentioned above is causing GA to report all this in the way that we want. We tried many different combinations and permutations and none of them gave us exactly what we were looking for except this one. So, since we can't be for sure, we suggest you use all the steps we stated above - even if one or more of them is unneeded. Again, I'm sure there's a simpler way to do this, but we don't know of one that works as reliably as this one.

Google Analytics Cross Domain Tracking Made Easy

Posted by Martijn Verstrepen

A default Google Analytics implementation will break your visits when tracking cross domain websites (such as webshops using an external payment gateway) because the first-party cookies can only be read from the domain that set the cookies. When switching domains a new cookie is created and thus a new visit is registered. This could result in an incorrect report of the number of visits, but even worse, it could also strip the original referrer from your visits. All that hard work that has been put into optimizing your SEO and SEM campaigns goes down the drain when all conversions and transactions get attributed to your own website as a referrer.

This can easily be fixed by adding some additional lines to the Google Analytics tracking script and by adjusting all links and forms pointing between the domains. This procedure is well documented by Google Code. For relatively simple websites adjusting all links and forms is pretty easy, but as time passes and your website becomes more complex maintaining a correct implementation becomes harder. You might forget to adjust some links or someone adds a new form that doesn't have the right adjustments. Luckily jQuery offers the ability to automatically adjust all links and forms pointing between the domains by including one script that can be used on all pages. To learn how jQuery works, how you can select specific DOM elements, and how you can apply functions, check out this jQuery documentation page.

Adjustments to pages on Domain A
If you haven't done so already include the jQuery library within your page:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Adjust your Google Analytics tracking script by adding the following line:

_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

Your script will look like this and should be placed in your <head> section:
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount','UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
//]]>
</script>

Include the following jQuery script after the jQuery include and before the GA tracking script:
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
$(document).ready(function() {
// Add onClick _link to all <a> elements on page where href contains example-B.co.uk
$("a[href*='example-B.co.uk']").click(function() {
_gaq.push(['_link', this.href]);
return false;
});

// Add onSubmit _linkByPost to all <form> elements on page where action contains example-B.co.uk
$("form[action*='example-B.co.uk']").attr("onSubmit","_gaq.push(['_linkByPost', this])");
});
//]]>
</script>

Adjustments to pages on Domain B
If you haven't done so already include the jQuery library within your page:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

Adjust your Google Analytics tracking script by adding the following line:

_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

Include the following jQuery script after the jQuery include and before the GA tracking script:
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
$(document).ready(function() {
// Add onClick _link to all <a> elements on page where href contains example-A.com
$("a[href*='example-A.com']").click(function() {
_gaq.push(['_link', this.href]);
return false;
});

// Add onSubmit _linkByPost to all <form> elements on page where action contains example-A.com
$("form[action*='example-A.com']").attr("onSubmit","_gaq.push(['_linkByPost', this])");
});
//]]>
</script>

You can test this by inspecting the url after clicking on any of the links or submitting any of the forms between the sites. You should notice a string of parameters appended to your url containing the cookie data from your originating domain. Google Analytics will process this url and recreate the cookie on the other domain causing the visit not to break and to keep the original referrer.

Link Popularity Guide

Link Popularity Section

Welcome to Link Popularity Guide

Link Popularity In the BlogOsphere

How to Build an Advanced Keyword Analysis Report in Excel

I Got 99 Problems, But A Keyword Visit Ain't One

To Be, Or Not To Be Searched, That Is The Question

The Impression That I Get

If You Ain't First Page, You're Last

The More You Know

Mo Money Mo Metrics

One Report To Rule Them All

Pivotal Success

Conclusion

How to Turn Your Content into Link Bait

Is Charity an Impulse Purchase?

An Attempt To Build The Perfect Link Checker

Lesson #1: No Matter How Good Something Is I Want Something Better

Interested yet?

How to Determine Exactly Which Google Display Network Site Delivered a Conversion

Or How to Track the Original (or First) Referrer of a Conversion using Google Analytics

Google Analytics Cross Domain Tracking Made Easy