Check rankings with Google Analytics, for real?
april 18th, 2009Just a few days ago, Google announced that there are som upcoming changes to the referring URL from google.com. Up until now the referring URL have looked something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search, förutsatt att besöket kom via ett klick på Googles förstasida.
From now on, starting with only a small percentage, the new referring URLs will 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.
Without any official comments on what the new parameters are, we can only speculate and hope that ‘cd’ will mean ranking. This would make my life so much easier, and for Google it has to mean a lot less searches made just to check rankings.
So to see if the cd parameter actually contains ranking information, earlier today I set up some filters, both to test if the new referring URLs are in use already, and to see what the cd parameter would hold. And I was more than a little stunned to see that the urls are in use already, especially since the test was performed on a site only getting traffic from Google Sweden, google.se.
I added 4 filters in total:
I added them to a new profile of an existing account, not to mess up any existing data. The first filter makes sure to exclude everything but the traffic from Google:
The second filter fetches the ‘cd’ parameter and stores it in ‘custom field 1′:
The third filter fetches the keyword from the referring url and stores it into ‘custiom field 2′:
The fourth, and last filter, puts the values stored in the custom fields into the”User defined” field, so that the information will be visible in the reports from within Google Analytics:
The results came after just a few hours, and I have deliberatly covered the actual keywords from the screen below:
I have double checked the rankings and they seem to be right. There are only some small differences.
If this is correct I guess we can expect to see native reports in Google Analytics for these numbers in the future.
april 18th, 2009 at 20:26
I’ve checked a few of theses referrals but none seem to give the right positions even referrals from ip’s with the same country I’m in. Strange
april 19th, 2009 at 8:15
From my tests it looks like the ranking is excluding results other than web results.
april 19th, 2009 at 16:54
[…] The impact if the “cd” parameter is huge as one can now track the ranking of his website for each keyword bringing traffic to the website. See how here (in French) or here (in English). […]
april 19th, 2009 at 17:10
[…] The impact if the “cd” parameter is huge, as now, one can track the ranking of his website for each keyword bringing traffic to the website. See how you can do it here (in French) or here (in English). […]
april 19th, 2009 at 17:55
It appears the querystring variable to get the rankings is “start” not “cd” and I have confirmed this is the rank.
april 19th, 2009 at 19:01
Ben Pate: The querystring variable “start” is from the old referring url, and it carries the value of the first result on the result page. So start=10 means that you where ranking somewhere on the second result page when the click came (11 - 20).
start=20 would mean the third result page, and the absense of the start variable means somewhere on the first page. (top 10).
With the new referring URLs that are slowly rolling out the cd variable will carry the actual ranking, not just which page it was ranking on.
april 20th, 2009 at 18:29
Its the ranking all right just as Bernt noticed.
But you can still get the result Referencement gets. Its seems to be as it works like a lot of other Google stuff and “against” yourself Google can seems to be out-of-order over different Google-DC, web-case and CDN.
Maybe one can say Google is a very statistic entity.
april 20th, 2009 at 18:46
I am sseing the new referring URLs on all clicks coming from sitelinks. And in those, resnum=x carries the rank and cd=x carries the index of the sitelink clicked.
Further tests are on the way.
april 21st, 2009 at 12:53
Yeah you would normally.
Well save your time on further test until you checked confirmation-information from Google which now exists.
A couple of Googler making befing active in comment threads. Didnt bother read it. I already looked at this quite long time ago when they introduced it to Google Account . where in regards on how it affected oldie Google Personal search - and the parameters as far I could see turns out exactly the same.