I love being able to wander about in an analytics account and being able to empirically prove the value that a search engine optimisation campaign has delivered. Showing the value of online investment in pounds and pence is one of the true revolutions that analytics and Internet marketing really brings to a business. To do this we all rely on our analytics being useful – and if the data going into your analytics is not correct the information you get from it can be seriously devalued. Increasingly I’m finding that analytics platforms, Google Analytics in particular, are reporting Google Product Search as natural search – not nice if you want to determine the worth of SEO or product search. With just a simple change to your product search information you can prevent this – and start analysing the true value of your online marketing channels.

Why are analytics platforms mis-reporting product search results?

Generally it is the domain that is used by analytics platforms to make a decision about traffic coming from a search engine rather than being simply a referral from another website. To do this it looks at the referrer information and compares this to see if website that directed the traffic to your website.

Referrer processing order – in pseudocode

if (isset $referrer){

$referrer = strip_tld($referrer); // Remove .com, .co.uk, .net, etc...
switch($referrer){

case "google": $traffic_medium = "natural"; $traffic_source = "google"; break();
case "bing": $traffic_medium = "natural"; $traffic_source = "bing"; break();
case "yahoo": $traffic_medium = "natural"; $traffic_source = "msn"; break();
default : $traffic_medium = "referral"; $traffic_source = $referrer; break();
}
}
else{
$traffic_medium = "direct";
}

Basically we check to see if there is referrer information available – get rid of anything relating to the TLD and the process the information to pass into the analytics platform. If we know the domain as a search engine the traffic is allocated to this and the source is set to allow us to see this.

It’s this process that causes your analytics problems – as the traffic is allocated to natural search. I was looking for some new whisky for my collection earlier and was on this result page when I saw something which may be causing an issue for the guys over at http://www.masterofmalt.com. To resolve this we need to start overwriting the medium variable with some new information.

Refining you feed for Google Product Search

I’m creating a Google Product Search feed in excel – but the rules that follow can be transfered to all the normal ways of creating a feed (if you have an application which runs directly off of your server you may need to do a wee bit of ‘hacking‘ to get this working). I’m also implementing this on the basis of Google analytics being your tracking platform.

All we are looking to do is to append a variable onto the URL that you specify for a product to tell Google Analytics that the click has not came from natural search and instead. All we do is append the ‘utm_medium’ variable to your URL to let Google Analytics know it’s from product search and we’re away running.

Take for example the lovely little Rosebank they stock from the Flora and Fauna range (my local distillery until they mothballed it in 1993). The link from product search takes you a visitor to http://www.masterofmalt.com/whiskies/rosebank-12-year-old-whisky/ all we do is change this to be http://www.masterofmalt.com/whiskies/rosebank-12-year-old-whisky/?utm_medium=Product_Search. Now we have tracking working!

There you go. A Google Analytics hack for today to make your analytics more accurate and useful. Right back to the whisky

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on Google Analytics
• Get more out of Google Analytics | Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug

• Related Blogs on Google Product Search