Track SEO Organic Rankings with Google Analytics

In April 2009, Google announced that they were making some changes to how the referral URL would look like on their search engines.

One of the key information that’s provided here is the listing’s organic ranking (cd parameter). This can be found in the referral URL property (or document.referrer when referring to the DOM).

It’s been more than 1.5 years since the announcement so I figured that the gradual roll out would be almost complete (I still see instances of the old referral URL being used though) so I decided to implement a filter for Google Analytics that will pull in the organic ranking data and show it in the keyword reports.

Before we get into it, there’s something important to know about the cd parameter. Traditionally in SEO, we’ve always known the SERPs to contain 10 organic listings (as shown below).
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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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