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.

From what I’ve been reading over the last week or two it would appear that following  the puchase of IndexTools by Yahoo! IndexTools is going to be made free! Soon you should be able to get an enterprise analytics package for your website and for at the best price you’ll get online – absolutely nothing :p

Is IndexTools better than Google Analytics?

You bet. I’m a strong believer in Omniture (it’s fab & when you plugin in some modules it rocks your online marketing world – if you havent seen Test& Target you’re in for a treat). Over at Search Engine Watch they described the free IndexTools like getting 80% of Omniture but free. To me is this is true the difference we could all be seeing from our free analytics package could be vast.

When can you sign up for your Free IndexTools?

Ah the difficult question – and the truth is I have no idea. All the ‘buzz‘ seems to be about it happening. At present I can find no information on timescales.

If you know any more about release dates for the free IndexTools or have some comments to make let us know in the comments below. I am sure we’ll be talking more the free analytics war that’s building in the nesr future.

Over the weekend I started to see a spike in traffic one of my sites was receiving from Google Image Search in Google analytics. Unfortunately when I start to dig deeper into it I find that Google Analytics won’t show me what the queries were that drove all the traffic to the site.

I love Google analytics: its free, simple to install and can be up and running in minutes and tracking almost instantly. However these kind of little glitches that I find that drive me up the wall. surely the piece of code that extracts the query is almost the same as that used for the noraml search queries.

While trying to develop a solution I thought the bestplace to have a look would be through the blogosphere and start hacking through some blogs to ‘borrow’ a solution that someone else has came up with for this. Some of the solutions for tracking image search traffic through Google analytics look complicated – probably as my JavaScript skills are minimal.

The best solution looks to be that advocated by Joost DeValk. I’m away to test this out and see how it works. If anyone knows of a better way to do this can you let me know. Thanks is advance.