Only few Google referrers show keyword

90.000 referrers from Google alone but only 24.000 visits with keywords

[zgb999]

On a site using nettracker as stats software we had 90.000 referrers from Google alone in the last months and many thousand referrers from other search engines.

Nevertheless if we look at the keywords report it has only 24.000 visites that nettracker was able to get a keyword from.

Even if Googles spider was seen as visit with a referrer from Google (which should not be the case) - as we only had 3'600 visits from the Google spider it nevers sums up to the 90.000 referrers from Google.

Anybody has any idea why a stats software should not be able to track the keywords a visitors has used on a search engine?

[helohelo]

I think its cause its a log analyzer.
cookiebased/javascript tag analyzer are better, only disadavantage: they cannot see spiders or pdf donloads with succes.

[zgb999]

Log analyzers get not the best results in some cases. But a referrer is always stored in the logfiles and as long as a stats software knows where in the querry of a Google URL to look for the keyword this SHOULD not be a problem at all. (As it is a problem somebody will probably prove me wrong but I try to understand whether this is a question of settings or some general problem).

[GeorgeGG]

Is nettracker only looking for keywords that follow a '&q'?
I check in this order:
'&q', '&query', '&as_q', '&as_epq' and '&as_oq'.

Links from news groups would not use the above, they can be parse out
by checking for 'groups.google.' and/or the message id, '&selm', '&seekm'
or '&th'. And the news server it was posted on by spliting on the last '@' or '%40'.

GeorgeGG

[cgrantski]

Is it possible that your analysis exceeded an internal limit in NetTracker? In a lot of reporting software, the internal table sizes have predefined limits in order to help processing. Usually, there are ways to increase those limits.