One of the downfalls to the approach outlined in the previous article is that the keyword reports produced by the filters display %20 instead of spaces in the User Defined Value, as shown in the following screenshot:

My first reaction was to try and create a Search and Replace filter in the Google Analytics profile, but Google does not allow you to enter a single space in the Replace String field, instead treating that field as being empty. Other people recommend using an underscore instead of a space as the replacement character.

The solution is to use a non-breaking space (Option+Space on OSX, or Alt+0160 on Windows). The only other issue is that the filters will only replace once instance of %20 with a space, so you’ll need to create several (I usually create five or six and call it a day).

After you make this change, note that it will take a few days to start seeing it take effect. Here’s a screenshot with the updated filters in place, also notice that I’ve put the rank information at the front of the user defined field so that it is always visible.

The new format promises to reveal much more information about the search result rankings that was previously available, and this post will show you how to take advantage of that information to tune your SEO efforts using Google Analytics.

Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages. Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term “flowers”, for example, would be something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

Now you will start seeing some referrer strings that look like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

What does that mean for me?

Common speculation is that the cd parameter in the referral URL indicates the position of your page in the search results, and this has been confirmed by Matt Cutts.

Knowing what position your pages hold in the SERPS for a given keyword can be enormously helpful to your SEO efforts, so it makes sense to start tracking this new data. Prior to the change in referer, it was possible to track your SEO rankings with Google Analytics, but you could only get information about the page on which you were ranking for a keyword search, not your overall position.

Create a New Profile

You are definitely going to want to create a new profile within Google Analytics so that you do not interfere with the data that is already being collected for your site (The profile that we are about to set up will only capture data for organic search results from Google that use the new referer string).

Sign in to your Google Analytics account and “Add a Profile for an Existing domain”. You can give it any name you like, I chose to use “Google SERP Ranking”.

Create the Filters

The first thing that we need to do is create a couple of filters to make sure that only organic google searches are included in this profile. Order is important, so make sure that you either create your filters in the order that they are described here, or that you go back when you are finished and reorder them appropriately.

1. Include Organic Search Results

Create your first custom include filter using the Campaign Medium filter field and a filter pattern of organic.

2. Include Google Search Results

Create another custom include filter using the Campaign Source filter field and a filter pattern of google.

3. Include New Google Referral URL

Create the final custom include filter using the Referral filter field and a filter pattern of google.com/(search|url).*\bcd=\d*.

4. Extract Keyword and Ranking Data

The last filter we need to create is an advanced filter that will extract data from the referal string and create custom output that will be viewable in our reports. Create an advanced custom filter, and set the pulldowns, text areas and radio buttons as shown in the screenshot. This will extract the keywords and SERP position from the referal string and replace the output with our own custom string in the format <keyword> (Rank: <position>)

For clarity, here are the three regular expressions from the previous screenshot:

\bq=([^&]*)
\bcd=(\d*)
$A1 (Rank: $B1)

Visualizing Results

Once you have created the new profile and filters, and have started receiving traffic, you should be able to see the keyword/ranking data in any of your reports when you change the dimension to User Defined Value.

Please share your experiences with this or any other helpful Google Analytics tricks that you use!

Update: You can also replace the %20 with a space in your reports by adding some additional filters

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

What is my PageRank?

There are a number of ways to check your PageRank, but some of the easiest and most useful come in the form of Firefox plugins. These are a few of the most popular:

• SEO For Firefox
• SearchStatus
• Live PageRank

My Member Access and UserVoice WordPress plugin pages received an increase in PageRank, but for the most part pages here retained the same ranking. How did your site fare after this Google PageRank update?

Here’s a sample of what people are saying on Twitter about the latest Google PageRank update:

• @KennethMoody: The Google Pagerank God has been been good. – 8:24
• @jredd77: Celebrating my website’s PageRank increase from 0/10 to 3/10 overnight. – 9:21
• @highonbeingdave: Finally got my web site from 0 to 1 on PageRank! Yippie! (cheap thrills come easily) – 10:26

Join the conversation!