Cool Custom Report: Google Organic Rank dimension
Applies to: Software
You probably know that Google announced the following last month: when somebody clicks on an organic search result item on a Google search results page, the referrer string for the landing page will now contain the rank of that original result item as it appeared on the Google results page, to that visitor. So — if theyclick on a #6 position item, the referrer field of the landing page will contain a parameter “cd=6″ in addition to the normal “q=<search+term>” and other Google info. Google’s plan is to have this organic rank URL parameter happening in all of its search results, eventually. Right now, it’s fairly rare. But here at The Outsider we’re on top of it anyway.
If you want to turn that “cd=<rank>” string into a custom dimension, this post tells you how.
With this dimension, you can make a custom report on keywords where each keyword has a list below it of ranks (1…2…3…), showing the number of visits that came from a listing at that rank. The “list below it” is, in WebTrends-speak, called a secondary custom report dimension. The list of keywords would be of course the primary custom report dimension for the report.
It’s pretty easy and actually uses the techniques we described in a recent post about using a subpart of a URL. (In fact, it was our playing around with the new Google referrer field that led to that other post in the first place.) In that post, we talked about using a subpart of a URL. In this post, we’re going to use part of the referrer field.
There are two parts to this.
First, you have to enable the display of referring page query parameters. This is a simple hack to a config file (if you use the WebTrends software). The hack is described in this post: http://www.webtrendsoutsider.com/2010/the-referring-pages-report-getting-the-parameters-to-show-up/
Second, you have to create the dimension. Set it up as follows:
1. Create it and give it a name
2. On the next screen, base it on “Referring Page (initial in visit)”. Using this basis will turn it into a visit-based dimension. That’s how the WebTrends built-in search phrase dimension works too. If you want, you can instead base it on “Referring Page (any in visit)” and it will be a hit-based dimension that will act in a different way. See our post on visit versus hit dimensions for a little more information.
3. Click on the Advanced button to open the subpart dialog.
4. Activate the Regular Expression button and type in this regular expression:
cd=([0-9]*)
(what this does is … locates “cd=” then extracts any immediately-following numeral(s), and stops extracting when it hits something that is not a numeral.)
That’s it. Now it’s up to you to make a new custom report with “Search Phrase” as the primary dimension and this as the secondary dimension. We suggest NOT checking the box that says “Exclude activity without dimension data” for this new dimension, because it helps to see how incredibly sparse these new referrers are. We also suggest that you filter out PPC traffic and that you filter-in the google.com referrers.
PostScript:
- As said above, Google hasn’t rolled this out completely. You may not see results at first. Some people estimate this is appearing in 10% of search results links on Google. My experience is that it’s less than that.
- Google’s initial writeup of this hardly mentioned the rank parameter, but here’s the link. http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/upcoming-change-to-googlecom-search.html
- Google is doing this only for organic listings, not PPC. If you use PPC ads, it would be a good idea to remove PPC traffic from this report. We talked about identifying PPC traffic in another post with a bit more in yet another post on PPC reporting.
- We’d love it if you’d bother WebTrends with a feature request about adding the ability to base custom measures on the referrer. At the very least, they will find out if it’s easy or hard for them to do, should they decide to do it. We suspect they are already looking into it – give them encouragement.
14 comments
Cool stuff
We already have some really neat organic phrase reports with dozens and dozens of good measures, I’ve been meaning to create the dimension and add it to those series of reports. Could show some really cool information that will make others motivated to improve our rankings.
Exactly!
Rocky – thanks for this information. On the very last bullet in your postscript – we are looking into it. Please give us feedback at the link you mention or to any of us from our blog page as well (see above).
Derek, I knew you guys would be thinking along these lines. Great.
This is great. I agree it’s a quick way to demonstrate to users that rankings need some work.
I would like to also encourage WebTrends to expand custom measures to include the referrer field, because there often is important information tucked away there, such as the campaign parameters that took someone to the referring page in the first place. I hope it’s feasible.
Doing this report in WebTrends seems much simpler than doing the same thing in Google Analytics. There was an article about doing it in Google Analytics in Web Master World today, with some indications that people were having trouble getting it to work properly.
Thanks for the post. A couple of thoughts:
1. Would it make sense to create a custom measure (with average as the method) based on cd, as opposed to a second dimenision. I can definitely see the value of having this as a dimension, but when we get into the exploding table limits, it gets kinda hairy.
2. From the blogpost you had included, it looks like Google will be changing the structure of the referring URL which means that the backend mappings for what referrers is part of what search engine may need updating.
Thanks for this wonderful page. WebTrends should pay you guys a lot of money to just continue running it for them
ngg – thanks! We’ll make sure WT sees your comment! However, they kind of paid it forward. We’d be nowhere without all the tech support calls and patience over the years. And the product itself, flawed as it is, is the reason we’re having fun at our day job.
Your other comments:
1. It would make total sense. That would be a terrific measure. Unfortunately custom measures in WT cannot currently be based on the referrer field — just on what’s in a query parameter or a cookie. WebTrends says they are looking into how hard it would be to expand the custom measure capability to include the referrer. Could be easy, or all-but-impossible. Given how much info gets packed into the referrer these days, it could be very valuable. On the other hand, given all the situations where the referrer gets stripped before logging, it might not be worth a lot of trouble.
And, regarding your #2, so far the proposed changed referring URLs won’t affect WebTrends’ search engine definitions. Good thing! Some of those definitions are hard-coded, and not easily changed by us users.
Another great reporting idea! Sadly, I cannot get anything to report outside of ‘none’ for the secondary dimension. Using HTTPFox, I can see that the referrer string sent to WebTrends almost always contains the ‘cd=’ parameter, but our report is still not showing them. Anyone else having this same issue? Thanks again!
I implemented the report the way you described but I do not get any rank numbers. Can you tell me why?
We do get traffic from google.
[...] Cool Custom Report: Google Organic Rank dimension [...]
I can’t get this to work. At first I was thinking that it could be that Google hasn’t rolled out yet but now I have verified that they did but I still got all ‘None’. Any idea?
I’ve realized I left out an important step. You have to change WebTrends so that the rank parameter is actually available to be displayed. I made that change so long ago that I had forgotten it was in effect. The posting has now been revised to take this into account.
Due to a defect with version 8.7d and the latest release of Ondemand this report is currently not possible and will not work.
The details of the defect have to do with the regex used in the dimension to pull out the value of “cd=” being broken and none functional.
I do believe this would work though in version 8.5x
I just thought it would be nice for everyone to know before attempting this report.
We also used Tealeaf and I was looking in there to verify.
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