Google Organic Rankings Quality Score

Is there such a thing? I’ve always wondered whether Google‘s organic search algorithm factors in clickthrough rate (CTR) and SERP ranking (normalised) to provide a quality score for organic listings.

This is similar to how Google Adwords’ quality score works. The higher CTR you have and normalising it against the ad position gives you a higher quality score which translates into lower CPC bid. This is how Google rewards advertisers that focus on quality and relevancy instead of just pure bidding.

The understanding is that the better optimised your text ad is (relevancy) for the actual search query and the bid term, the higher CTR you’ll receive which means searchers are taking an action and making a decision (i.e. they’ve found what they’re looking for!).

This in turn rewards Google as well because they’ve provided quality advertisements from advertisers and thus, more people continue using Google and more revenue is made through CPC ads.

So the question is, does this theory of quality score from Adwords apply to organic rankings? If I optimise my site so that it gets equal or higher CTR than what the average is for the SERP position, in Google’s eyes, is my site more relevant to the user thus rewarding my site with a higher ‘quality score’ and a higher quality score means my site would generally rank higher/better for the theme surrounding the search query?

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How To Track Sub-Domains / Cross-Domains in Google Analytics

First of all, let me explain why in Google Analytics you need to do some configurations to track sub-domains / cross-domains.

Google Analytics does not do this by default, thus whenever you’re on sub1.domain.com and you go to sub2.domain.com, Google Analytics will record this as a referral rather than maintaining the same session and the same campaign information. If you’re running e-commerce tracking and you use sub-domains during the e-commerce process, this will totally screw up your reports as it will attribute all transactions to referrals (from your own site) and you will have no idea how your other online marketing campaigns (i.e. direct, organic, cpc) are performing.

Sub-Domain Tracking

This one is fairly easy. The method you need to use is _setDomainName().

The _setDomainName() method sets the Google cookies to the domain name string parameter that it is given, otherwise it automatically resolves the domain name from the location object in the DOM if no parameter is given. This means that on sub-domains, the cookies will be set to separate sub-domains.

So to configure Google Analytics to set the cookies to the same domain name, simply use the domain name as the string parameter for the _setDomainName() method.

E.g. If I have a website called sub1.dannytalk.com and sub2.dannytalk.com, I would use _setDomainName(‘dannytalk.com’) throughout all my pages (sub-domains and main domain).

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x"); // replace this with your own account number
pageTracker._setDomainName("dannytalk.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

The Google API officially states to use the period at the start of the domain name. I have tried with and without and it seems to work fine but I prefer without period (looks nicer).

Once you’ve done this, Google Analytics should record all visits to these sub-domains as the same visit, maintaining the same campaign information. However, in your reports,you won’t be able to tell which request URI came from which sub-domain as the domain name is stripped out from the reports.

In addition, if you have two sub-domains that have the same page name (i.e. index.html), then Google Analytics will combine these two into one which will artificially inflate your page statistics.

A simple way around this is to implement what I call a sub-domain visibility filter which will prefix your request URI’s with the domain name. This will help you differentiate the pages as well as avoid inflating the page statistics.

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Google Analytics Individual Qualification Tips – I Just Passed My Test

I just passed my Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test today and scored 94%! Not bad eh? The passing score is 75%. So thought I’d post some tips here while the exam questions are still fresh in my mind.

You have 2 hours to complete the exam (more than enough) and there’s 70 questions that consist of multiple choice, true/false and select all that applies type questions. Basically the trickiest one I found was the select all that applies type questions.

Materials To Go Through – Conversion University

Before you start the GAIQ exam, make sure you go through the materials at Google‘s conversion university – especially the ones that you don’t know much about. I didn’t go through all of them, just the ones I thought would be handy to refresh myself with.

The ones that I think will be handy are:

• Profiles in Google Analytics
• Filters in Google Analytics
• Cookies and Google Analytics
• E-Commerce Tracking
• Domains and Sub-Domains

Knowledge To Learn

In my opinion, these are some of the things you should’ve had some experience implementing before doing the test. If you haven’t, go play around with it!

• E-Commerce Tracking (addTrans, addItem methods)
• Cross Domain / Sub-Domain Tracking (link, linkByPost, setDomainName, setAllowLinker, setAllowHash methods)
• Goal Setup (note: Multiple same goal conversions within a session are unique)
• Profile Setup (note: What are the benefits of creating more than 1 profile? What can/can’t you do with profiles?)
• Filter Setup (predefined, include/exclude, search & replace and custom – advanced)
• Integration with Google Adwords (cost data import, auto-tagging)
• Google Analytics interface (reports, user/filter management)
• Regular Expression (note: You don’t have to be a pro, but it definitely helps)
• Cookies (note: Google uses first-party cookies and you cannot identify an individual through it)

Handy Links

Here are some handy links that you should have open during the test: Continue reading »

Google Analytics: Does 301/302 Redirect Preserve Referrer Information?

In case you’re wondering whether 301 redirects preserve the referrer information or not and how this may affect Google Analytic’s referrer information, I’ll show you a simple example.

So pretty much what I did was I did a Google search for clothes and found some ads on the right hand side. I used firebug to extract the destination URL as I didn’t want to inflate their costs because I’m just doing an example. What I look for are obvious tracking URLs that track and monitor search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns such as DART (Double Click).

You can also figure this one out by seeing the domain of the URL. If this is different to the display URL, most likely this is a tracking URL because Google Adwords has enforced the policy that the destination and display URL must be the same (it’s ok to use tracking URLs though as long as you land on the same domain as the display URL).

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Google Analytics: Adding True Search Query Terms Using Advanced Filters

In Google Analytics keywords report, you can only segment the keywords by total, paid and non-paid, which pretty much means total, non-cpc and cpc. Also in the keywords report, whenever someone arrives to your website via a cpc medium such as Google Adwords, it will only report the keyword matched in your adgroup keyword list, but not the true search query the visitor typed in.

With a little help of Google Analytics‘ custom advanced filters, you’re able to show in your reports what the true search query was and segment it by mediums.

The screenshot above is an example of how the report will look like after the filters are applied. As you can see, within the brackets is the true search query used on search engines and other shopping portals (i.e. Lasoo, Shopping.com, Shopbot). Of course this example doesn’t show any cpc medium because I don’t run any cpc campaigns. Sponsor me and I will :)

This is pretty handy to see on your reports because now you’re able to segment your keywords by medium as well. Of course you could probably use advanced segments to do this but this incorporates true search query and segmentation at the same time.

So the first step I would recommend is to make sure you set up a test profile. You can skip this part and work on your main profile if you like.

To do so, go to your analytics overview dashboard and click on Add Website Profile. Make sure you select the Add a Profile to an existing domain and from the drop down menu, select your website domain.

You can name it test profile or whatever you like as long as you know it’s a test profile. Pretty much this is your hack and abuse profile where you do experiments and tests on it so that it doesn’t affect your main profile’s reports. Once you’re happy it’s working correctly, you can move your filters etc. to your main profile.

Now the next step is to determine your regular expression to extract search query terms from your referral URLs.

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