Display Search Engine Rankings (SEO) in Google Analytics

April 19, 2009 by Mike Small

By default, Google Analytics will show you some great information about your organic search engine rankings (also known as “free” or “natural results”), such as which terms brought visitors to your site via the search engines. However, Google Analytics does not include where that keyword ranked as part of the display. This information is now even more valuable as individualized/personalized search results mean that we all get different results and thus have rendered the tools that monitor rankings less accurate.

There have been several methods to provide clues about ranking information in the past, but each had it’s limitations. But now that Google is modifying the way queries are structured, we can use this filter that will bring us this information inside the reports automatically.

Using this method, the standard Keywords report will now display the keywords ranking in parenthesis directly after the term.

websharegooglerankingfilter11

The Filter(s)

There are two versions of the filter: a simple one-step filter for those not running pay-per-click campaigns (like Google AdWords) and a two-step filter for those that are running PPC.
Below is the simplified, one step version:

websharegooglerankingfilter2sm

Filter Text:
Campaign Term: (.*)
Referral: (?|&)(cd)=([^&]*)
Campaign Term: $A1 ($B3)

If you are using AdWords or other paid search, you may want to use the alternate two-step filter that will isolate the organic traffic.

Tip: We suggest creating a new profile specifically for this filter so that you can maintain the default keyword report in addition to this enhanced version.

Caveat: Google is currently rolling out the new format, so it will not capture the ranking of all of the keywords immediately.

http://www.tailormade-jeanswear.com/ Atul

This is awesome ! I have applied the filter and waiting for the reports. When do you think the keywords will appear ? After 24 hours ?. Also will I have to go User Defined > User report to see the ranking report exactly as displayed above.

Please reply.
http://andrescholten.nl André Scholten

Nice follow up on my filter, who would have thought Google Analytics would replace all ranking tools
http://www.WebshareDesign.com Corey

@Atul
The ranking will appear only when users search via the new Google interface, which appears to be rolling out to some users as we speak.
This particular filter doesn’t use the user defined report, but actually modifies the the keyword report itself. This avoids the problems with the user defined report method, but means that you probably should apply the filter in a new profile to be on the safe side.
Tim Leighton-Boyce

Another reason to recommend using this filter in a separate profile is that the result may affect your ability to easily see the traffic brought by each key phrase as a whole.

Until some data is built up the implications of this may not be clear, but it seems likely to me that personalized search results will mean that each key phrase may well appear several times. This will, in itself, be interesting data. But it does mean that the combined total might not be obvious.

Based on what I’ve seen elsewhere, using the results page offset to set user-defined, there probably wont be many clicks from pages after the first one. But each key-phrase could well be repeated up to 10 times just from page one. It’ll be intersting to see.
http://www.goanalytics.info Marco Cilia

by this – still interesting – way, if Google modifies my position for a keyword, or user is runnig a search while logged, potentially i could see something like

keyword A (7)
keyword B (12)
KEYWORD A (6)
KEYWORD A (8)

is this filter disaggregating my keyword?

http://WebshareDesign.com Corey

@Marco
Yes. This is one of the reasons we suggest you run this filter in a new, duplicate profile, so that you can see this data, without altering your “standard” keyword reports.

http://analyseweb.fr Julien Coquet

Any major regexp difference between yours:
(?|&)(cd)=([^&]*)

and mine:
cd=([1-9]|10)

Just out of curiosity
http://www.freeanalyticsreport.com Stacy

Great post. I started providing reports utilizing filters. The clients are loving it.
http://www.savio.no Eivind Savio

Beware about the ranking numbers when they are getting larger than 10. Ranking 11 and larger (have seen up 20) can be page 1 rankings. I wrote about this some days ago (including my solution of tracking rankings):
http://www.savio.no/blogg/a/81/google-analytics-how-to-track-google-keyword-ranking-from-your-visitors
http://www.twitter.com/glager Gennady

What happens if the ranking changes within the date range? What position will be displayed?

http://WebshareDesign.com Corey

The ranking displayed is the ranking that was there when that visitor made the click. So if there are several positions during the time period when people click, you will have several positions listed.

http://www.faceyspacey.com James from FaceySpacey.com

Hey everyone, what percentage of searchers are being fed this search update?

admin

Just as a quick update – it appears that around 3-5% of profiled web traffic is seeing this search update, and note that it is ONLY applicable to Firefox browser users.

Bhavesh

Great Post & Very Useful..

I have applied the filters the way explained here & works fine.. So is this mean that I am getting organic keyword rankings for Google? or any other type of traffic like paid or adsense?

And what changes I will need to apply to make this filter work for both yahooo & msn as well? And again for organic keyword rankings.

Is following a correct way of applying filters to get the results for yahoo & MSN aprt from Google only?

Field A -> Extract A (Campaign Term) (.*)
Field B -> Extract B (Referral) (?|&)(cd|b|first)=([^&]*)
Output To -> Constructor (Campaign Term) $A1 (Rank: $B3)

Field A Required Yes
Field B Required Yes
Override Output Field Yes
Case Sensitive No

Thanks in advance.
Bhavesh

As I have mentioned above that filter mentioned in this article works fine for me, it shows in my GA,
that keyword A (8) for my site, but when I do search manually on Goggle then it shows my site on First Position.

Why is so?
http://optawise.com SEO Guy from Los Angeles

Thank you for contributing. I added your code to my google analytics account. I will report back my findings

cheers

SEO Guy
http://www.searchenginemarketingpeople.com andrew

Very nice information. Thanks for this.
http://www.searchlightinteractive.com Sean Elkin

I’ve long lobbied Google to create their own rank checking mechanism and charge for it, instead of of banning IP addresses or 3rd party services that task their servers with the same queries. They have the data, it’s quite obvious that rank checking is still an essential part of SEO (despite the “rankings are dead” camp). it’s great they are doing this, but it is currently less perfect than 3rd party solutions.

Why? It does not include Yahoo/Bing data (or outside U.S. if you’re doing international search) and it doesn’t have the reach yet (see the 3-5%) to be very useful or reliable (which, I know, is a strange word to use for any rank checker) as existing 3rd party solutions.

Andre, I wonder what you think about this solution vs your outstanding post that predated this. Looks like this indicates position and not page for google, but your solution has page capability for Yahoo and Bing (if I’m reading things correctly). Do you see a way to use above and apply to Yahoo and Bing too?

I spend a lot of time combining reports into one master spreadsheet (for SEO Audit phase) that shows keyword volume estimates, source & data on those words (GA, trellian, wordtracker, past traffic, brainstorming) + ranking on top 3 engines + urls ranking. In the end, it’s a wonderfully useful and powerful document. I have built a few macros to automate portions of it, but if we could get top 3 SE ranking data (position not page) built into GA reports…wow!

Sean
http://talkfree.com Justin

hello all,
My analytic skills are not as advanced, I have a question…

I’ve setup a new profile for my site and I’m beginning to see rankings on some keywords, but not all. I set it up a little under 24 hours ago. How long does it take to show the rankings for all keywords?
http://makethemclick.com.au Mark

The link to the two step adwords version doesn’t work.

It just reloads this page.
http://www.freespaceinteriors.com/ freespaceinteriors

A pleasant surprise, it occurs seldom, but the following we can speak of a real bonus value towards person who reads.

Display Search Engine Rankings (SEO) in Google Analytics

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