How to Track Google Products Traffic in less than 5 minutes
Analytics

How to Track Google Products Traffic in less than 5 minutes

24th September 2010

Ok,  Ready? Start your stop watch.  Go.

SEO without analytics is pointless.

I am sure we all agree on that point which is good because I have a time limit.

The beauty of Search Marketing is that it can be tracked, measured and defined. It is very important to realise that data which can be measured can be improved, and in our industry, measurement is crucial to success. This is even more apt if you work with an ecommerce client.

There are 2 ways to track traffic gained from Google Products; tagging URLs and inserting a filter within Analytics. One takes a while and can be quite complicated if you are exporting products to Google Base from a CMS, the alternative takes less than 5 minutes and is relatively simple.

Credit must go to Luna Metrics for their initial post on this and to ‘Latitude’ for amending the “Field A -> Field B” code to allow UK users to gain results instead of just US.

Follow the steps below so you can start seeing traffic which has been gained via visitors finding your site in Google Products. The only drawback on this method is that it doesn’t track visitors that come via the 3 pronged shopping results feature in the universal search results and will only track if visitors click the “shopping results for PRODUCT” link for more results and then click through to your site. This is because the tracking works by highlighting ‘google.com/products’ as the referrer and if someone clicked through to your site straight from the initial search results page then the referrer would be ‘google.co.uk/search’ and will be counted as normal organic – Try it for yourself but remember to stop the clock!

So to implement the filter follow these steps:

1.    Go to your analytics and once in your chosen account profile click on edit
2.    Now click on adding a new filter

3.    Type in the following:

Field A -> Field B

Referral

google.(com|co.uk)/products

Field B -> Extract B

Campaign Medium

organic

Output To -> Constructor

Campaign Source

google base

Now make sure you highlight the four required fields below so it looks like this:

Now just like any tagged URLs you can see traffic is listed separately as “google / organic” and “google base / organic” which will allow you to distinguish organic search traffic from product search in less than 5 minutes!

This filter should also be able to track conversions via ecommerce too  (if you have that already set up on your site)

Happy Friday, now go enjoy your weekends.

Written By
Sam Murray graduated from University with a BA (Hons) in Marketing in 2007 and wrote his 10,000 word dissertation on Search Marketing. Sam is a freelance search manager.
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