Google Analytics Exact Search Query Filter

November 30, 2008


It is vital to know what exactly what your traffic searched to find you since more than 50% of all searches are unique & we could never predict all of the keywords that are relevant and not relevant to our business. The solution that Google offers its advertisers for this problem is the Search Query Report you can easily find in reports tab, It is very simple; All you must do is generate a report for a long period of time in order to get quality results. This report shows you some real terms you got clicks from that were not in your campaign as a result of phrase and broad match keywords. The down part about it is that Google decided they are not ready to provide us with comprehensive data and in the search query reports we receive lots of BS in the form of "2,624 other unique queries"!!! So the bottom line is that the Google SQR only gives us about a quarter of the valuable information we are looking for.

BTW... The reason we want to know about all of these "other unique queries" we are getting clicks from is in order to add them to our campaign or to our negatives in case they are totally irrelevant. That way we may track their performance with much more precision, manage their bids according to ROI & CPA and be aware of our audience's search behavior.

their are a couple of great solutions we have found for this problem:

  1. Google Analytics Exact Search Query Filter sleuth script which tracks all of the unique queries and stores them in your analytics account under "User Defined Values" which you will find in your "paid traffic sources" - this will give you all of the other unique queries that are so valuable. First you must host the Sleuth Script on your servers, then follow ROI Revolutions instructions.
  2. Another nice solution is using external analytics programs such as hittail.com and pmetrics that track your search queries and give many more interesting statstics about the traffc going through your website.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool post!
In the new Google AdWords interface I am currently Beta testing, you can add these words as negatives straight from the search query report! No exporting to csv etc, just select your keyword in your report, and ad it as a negative to your chosen adgroup/campaign. Pretty nifty!

Elan said...

The problem is that Google Doesn't show you a tenth of the exact search queries your really getting. They show "1,524 Other Unique Queries" and those are actually the important ones to learn about. In order to find out about them you must install an advanced exact search query filter on Google Analytics.

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