Zero visits from keyword in Google Analytics
-
The keyword "business engagement in outsourcing" shows 0 visits. I have a look at Seomoz post at - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/advanced-google-analytics. According to it,
"If someone makes more than one visit to a site within the same "session" and each visit comes from a search but on different keywords, then both keywords will be included in the keywords report - the first with 0 visits and the second with 1 visit"
In my GA report, i could only see 0 visit for the above keyword. Why is 1 visit not being shown ?
On reading the blog, http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/04/google-analytics-tips-and-tricks-why-do.html#axzz1UPqhMV7o
i am more confused, as it says "Google Analytics, assigns the visitors activity to the first keyword " . which is NOT what seomoz suggests
-
Thanks for following up Will.
-
Thanks for checking this out and not just taking it at face value guys. I have to admit I didn't test it in detail. It seemed plausible because GA is generally last touch, but I'm glad to see someone testing it. I have updated the post.
-
Yes.
In this instance the testing I performed this week and the testing Anil performed in 2008 showed consistent results, and are in alignment with Google's explanation of how their sessions work.
A session begins when a user first visits your site. That session is maintained for 30 minutes even if the user leaves your site and returns to Google. Everything makes sense and synchs perfectly with the results.
If you wish to pursue this any further I can only suggest either repeating the test yourself, or contacting Will or Avinash concerning the prior article. I can only presume there was a misunderstanding in Will's article.
-
Thanks a lot Ryan. So, we can discount seomozz post ?
-
My test results support the first article you shared.
I duplicated Anil's test. I searched three times for the same site only using a long tail phrase with four words. I altered the 4th term each time.
The first phrase showed "1" visit, the other two phrases appeared in the report but showed "0" visits.
The other results were combined. Even though I did bounce on my first visit the Bounce Rate showed 0%. My bounce on the first visit was immediate but the Average Time on Site was 1:12 which is clearly the average of my three visits.
You can easily perform this test and have the results the next day. Choose a key phrase where you perform well in SERPs but is unlikely to be used in a search. Alter the last term a repeat the steps in Anil's test. The next day, check your GA.
-
Thanks Devin.
If i understood you correctly, GA is attributing the visit to a different keyword ( other than "business engagement in outsourcing" )
-
Thanks Devin.
If i understood you correctly, GA is attributing the visit to a different keyword ( other than "business engagement in outsourcing" )
-
Thanks Ryan. I would also go with the second article. But as you mentioned, its difficult to trust one source over another. I will be waiting for the results of your test. Here is another link.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=0d04370f123bc16c&hl=en on the same topic, which suggests that first keyword will show 1 visit, and the second keyword 0 visits. ( Again contradicting seomoz post )
-
The SEOmoz article you linked was published more recently (2009) than the other blog post (2008), so if you have to choose I would go with that one, since Google is constantly updating.
It might help to look at it as the number of 'unique visits'. You got a visit for "business engagement in outsourcing", but that same visitor subsequently did another search and came to your site from a different keyword. As a result, you got several visits for different keywords, but only one unique visit. GA attributed this visit to a different keyword, so "business engagement in outsourcing" is listed as drawing 0 visits.
..if that makes any sense?
-
Hi Atul.
What you have is common in the SEO world: two different SEOs who offer opposing explanations on the same topic. In this case they cannot both be correct. Some things to consider:
The first article was written by Anil Batra. I have never heard of him, but that's OK! He's probably never heard of me either. He lists his credentials at the top of the page which seem satisfactory.
Anil's article was well presented and he offered a screenshot of his results along with a meaningful description of the test he performed to draw the conclusion he ultimately made. The article was written in April 2008.
The second article was written by Will Critchlow of Distilled. Will has written other articles I have read and I find him to be a credible source of SEO information.
Will's article is also well presented. Will specifically shared he contacted Avinash Kaushik from Google who would be considered an expert on the topic. Will's article was written in Jan 2009.
Personally I would choose to accept Will's response being that it is more recent and I offer higher credibility to his Google contact. BUT, I am also hesitant to discount anyone's ideas, especially when they are well presented such as Anil's article.
The great news: we can easily try a new test and find the answer! It's been over 2 1/2 years since the most recent article. I'll go ahead and try some tests and share the results.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keywords for product title
Hi, I am trying set the product title for my product that I sell online, I have more than 300 products, I am now doing keywords research, any suggestion of the monthly search volume I should aim for each keyword? I just started and selling engagement rings
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | up8772910 -
Keyword cannibalization
Hi, I have two questions regarding keyword cannibalization. 1. I am doing the SEO for a website that sells do-it-yourself packages for heating, bathrooms, ventilation and so on for new houses or for renovations. The most important pages are the product pages (e.g. example.com/products/bathrooms) but there is also a blog divided into categories per product (e.g. example.com/category/bathrooms). The difference is clear: the product page focuses on the product itself, and the blog category page contains all blog posts relating bathrooms (tips, new materials, new innovations,...). My question is if the product page and blog category page can compete with each other for the term bathrooms (although they have different content). Does it help or is it enough to direct internal links from separate blog posts to the most important page (being the product page) and back to avoid my category blog page to compete with my product page? Another possibility would be to use a canonical tag on the category page pointing to the product page, but this actually isn't good practice because it isn't really duplicate content. Third possibility would be to no index the category page. So what is the best solution of the three? 2. A second example of keyword cannibalization can be category archive pages for webshops. If you have a category page example.com/jeans and a subcategory page example.com/jeans/women, is it useful to optimize on both pages for different terms, being jeans for the first page and jeans for women for the second, or will Google not make this distinction because the keyword are too closely related? In other words, is it useful to write content specifically for jeans for women and make a landing page for this keyword, or will this page compete with the category page that has been optimized for just the keyword jeans? In large clothing webshops, you can see for example that there is an optimized page for Nike (content, headings,...) but not for Nike for women or Nike for men. Is this just laziness or is this done exactly to avoid keyword cannibalization? Looking forward to your comments!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Keyword On Page 1 Everywhere but Google (Site Specific)
Website: www.wheelchairparts.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Bean
Keyword: wheelchair parts My website is #1 or #2 on almost every search engine besides Google. Google has us bouncing between the bottom of page 2 and top of 3. However we are on page one for "wheelchairparts". I need to get a link building campaign going for this site. I feel it's more difficult for ecommerce websites and nothing seems to fit in with Rand's Mozcon 2016 Link Building talk except hacks. I need to find a flywheel. Either way, my question is what can I do other than link building to get on page 1 of Google for the term "wheelchair parts"? Thanks in advance! - Mike Bean1 -
I think Google Analytics is mis-reporting organic landing pages.
I have multiple clients whose Google Analytics accounts are showing me that some of the top performing organic landing pages (in terms of highest conversion rates) look like this: /cart.php /quote /checkout.php /finishorder.php /login.php In some cases, these pages are blocked by Robots.txt. In other cases they are not even indexed at all in Google. These pages are clearly part of the conversion process. A couple of them are links sent out when a cart is abandoned, etc. - is it possible they actually came in organically but then re-entered via one of these links which is what Google is calling the organic landing page? How is it possible that these pages would be the top performing landing pages for organic visitors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Google index
Hello, I removed my site from google index From GWT Temporarily remove URLs that you own from search results, Status Removed. site not ranking well in google from last 2 month, Now i have question that what will happen if i reinclude site url after 1 or 2 weeks. Is there any chance to rank well when google re index the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Getmp3songspk0 -
GWT Keywords not showing my Keywords Focus, What to do?
Hello Community I will like ot know if im doing something wrong here..... I have setup keywords for my google ranking using yoasr SEO http://imgur.com/BCWTifV but in my Google Webmaster http://imgur.com/V1texto What im doing wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dawgroup0 -
Google and Product Description Tabs
How does Google process a product page with description tabs? For example, lets say the product page has a tab for Overview, Specifications, What's In the Box and so on. Wouldn't that content be better served in one main product description tab with the tab names used as (htags) or highlighted paragraph separators? Or, does all that content get crawled as a single page regardless of the tabs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Google Ranking Generally in Germany - Keywords & Umlauts
Hi Mozzers, I was hoping i could get some advice/opinions on a website ranking problem i have been working on, in particular one of the pages. This is our German language website which is hosted from Germany and a flaunt German speaking member of staff from our German office moderates the text content of the website for us.Our website seems to get good traffic ,visitor navigation and conversions. One of the keywords i focus building around is Schallpegelmessgerät which is one way of basically saying Sound level meter in German. The keyword uses an umlaut which i cannot use in the URL, but google is picking up and putting into the snippets, but apart from that our on-page optimization is good according to the moz tool. I have been trying to improve our content and we post many blog articles around the topic/keyword but google.de seems to choose not to even display this on the first couple of pages and sometimes ranks our blog articles around the third page. We are even been outranked by some low quality cheap online shop websites some of which with low quality content and low page and domain authorities. I had accepted this but after looking at bing.de and doing a search i find our page in the top 5 results, i understand that google and bing's algorhythms are different but just struggling to get my head around it all. Here is our website & page - http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgerat/ Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much for reading this James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0