travelin_cat - 11:37 pm on May 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

Google announced a change in the format of the referring URL as mentioned in this thread : [webmasterworld.com...]

Recently there have been a few blog posts summarizing the steps that allow you to set up a series of filters that when properly deployed will provide you with ranking results displayed next to the referring keyword string like this:

keyword+keyword (Rank: 1)
keyword+keyword +keyword (Rank: 1)
keyword+keyword +keyword (Rank: 4)

Here are the steps that I have sucessfully used on one of my sites:

1. Create a New Profile

Create a new profile within Google Analytics so that you do not interfere with the data that you may already have set up.

To do this, sign in to your Google Analytics account and click on"Add Website Profile" on the bottom of the page. Then choose "Add a Profile for an existing domain", choose the domain and give the profile a unique name.

2. Creating the Filters

NOTE : It is important to create these filters in the following order

2a. Include Organic Serps

Filter Type: Custom filter -> choose Include
Filter Field: Campaign Medium
Filter Pattern: organic
Case Sensitive: No

2b. Include Google Serps

Filter Type: Custom filter -> choose Include
Filter Field: Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: google
Case Sensitive: No

2c. Restrict to New Google Referral URL

Filter Type: Custom filter -> choose Include
Filter Field: Referral
Filter Pattern: google.com/(search¦url).*\bcd=\d*
Case Sensitive: No

2d. Construct Ranking String

Filter Type: Custom filter -> choose Advanced
Field A -> Extract A -> Choose Referral -> \bq=([^&]*)
Field A -> Extract B -> Choose Referral -> \bcd=(\d*)
Output To -> Constructor -> Choose User Defined -> $A1 (Rank: $B1)
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: Yes
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

3. Viewing the results

Once you have created the new profile and filters, it may take a couple of hours to start seeing results. You will find the new keyword/ranking data in any of your reports when you change the dimension to User Defined Value.

[edited by: engine at 4:16 pm (utc) on May 13, 2009]