How to Add Google Rankings to Google Analytics

This post will cover how to add Google rankings into your Google Analytics.

This post does not cover Bing/Yahoo ranking tracking.

Basically, we use the search ‘referring url’ to find cd=# of where the keyword was ranking when it was clicked on.

Here’s an example

When you go to google and search for SEO, you’ll get a page full of listings.
The 3rd listing (in this case) is seo.com
When I click on this listing, there is referring url that contains a lot of useful information like ranking.

www.google.com/url?sa=T&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CHcQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.seo.com%2F&ei=JJPtTeqbLMPZgQefrrylBw

CD=3 means that this listing was ranking #3 when it was clicked on.

Does 3 really mean #3 listing all the time? No.
Why? Google may have CD = 1-20 (an example) for just page 1.
Why? because they may include sitelinks, maps, images, videos, etc as listing. So if you have universal results, there maybe 15 listings on page 1.

Does Google always have the cd parameter in the URL? No. I’m not sure why they dont have it but I see it about 30-40% of the time

With Google Analytics we can setup filters that can extract parameters from the Google referring URL, and place them right next to the keywords list (in Google analytics).

So you have 2 options.
1. Create a new profile for yourdomain.com
2. Add a filter to yourdomain.com

I’m not going to cover which one you should do, but this post will be on how to setup on a current yourdomain.com profile.
*Creating a new profile for the same domain isn’t that hard to do.

 

Step 1.
Go to Google Analytics and click on EDIT

 

 

 

Step 2.

Click on Add Filter

 

 

 

Step 3.
a. Add a filter name (it can be any name)
b. Click on Custom Filter
c. Click on Advance
Add the following in the fields
d. Campaign Term – (.*)
e. Referral – (\?|&)(cd)=([^&]*)

f. Campaign Term – $A1 (Rank: $B3)
Instead of ‘rank’ you can put position or anything you want.
If you leave the word ‘rank’ then your keywords will look like
seo (rank: 3)

If you remove the word ‘rank’ and just want to show the ranking in parentheses then you can use
Campaign Term – $A1 ($B3)
This will equal
seo (3)

g. Make sure to put all Yes for the 3 radio buttons. Click on NO for Case Sensitive

 

 

 

 

 

 

This will NOT update all of your analytics. This is a filter that will affect future rankings that have the “cd=” in the referring url.
You can setup a separate profile for yourdomain.com to test it out.
If you receive tons of visits, then you’ll start seeing it in minutes.

Side note – as a reminder make sure to write in an annotation in your Google analytics of when you added this filter.