SEO tools like WebCEO or SEO Elite are normally used to track rankings of keywords. It is also possible to check them manually which is fine for a few selected keywords but impossible for webmasters who track hundreds or even thousands of keywords.

I recently came upon a post on a blog that explained how to track Google rankings in Google Analytics. It did not work at first and I had to fix an error before the ranking tracking was actually working. Below is now the explanation on how to track a website’s ranking in Google.

You start by adding a new profile to an existing website. Start by clicking on the Add New Profile link on the right side of the overview of all websites that have been added to Google Analytics.

Now select to add a profile for an existing domain, select the domain from the drop down list and give it a unique name, e.g. website rankings. A click on continue will create the new website profile which will initially track the same data that the original profile is tracking.

You will be taken back to the profile overview page. Click on the edit link next to the newly created profile. Click on the Add Filter link on the right lower side of the profile detail page.

We need to create three new filters:

Filter name: Ranking 1
Filter type: Custom filter – Include
Filter field: Campaign Medium
Filter pattern: organic

Filter name: Ranking 2
Filter type: Custom filter – Include
Filter field: Campaign Source
Filter pattern: google

Filter name: Ranking 3
Filter type: Custom filter – Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Campaign term, (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Referral, (\?|&)cd=([^&]*)
Output To -> User Defined: $A1 (position: $B2)

It then takes a few hours before the first rankings can be checked as the new profile will start tracking traffic beginning with the time it was created.

The rankings are then accessible by clicking on Visitors > User Defined when checking the stats of a website. They look like this

And there you have it. A dead easy way to track keyword rankings in Google.

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Lets begin with some basic information about browsers and operating system. More than 50% of all Ghacks visitors are using the Firefox web browser followed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with 35%, Google Chrome with 4%, Safari with 4% and Opera with close to 4%. The situation is different operating system wise. Roughly 90% of all users that come to Ghacks use a Windows operating system, hence the major concentration on that operating system. Apple Macintosh users make up almost 6% of all visits while Linux users are close to 3.5%.

If you look at some of the more technical statistics available you notice more diversity in the numbers. While 1024×768 is still the major screen resolution with almost 24%, 1280×800 with almost 20%, 1280×1024 with 16%, 1680×1050 and 1440×900 with 10% each are all above the 10% value and worth considering. There are still about 2% of all users that access with a screen resolution of 800×600.

And yes, there are some pretty strange resolutions out there like 2048×768, 3840×1024, 832×624, 1050×1400 or 1296×1304.

Where are all the visitors coming from? A majority of 40% comes from the United States followed by the United Kingdom with almost 9%, Canada with 5%, India and Australia with 3% and Germany with almost 3%.

The majority of users has a broadband connection at his disposal although there is a large 30% unknown factor in the stats. DSL, Cable and T1 users make up almost 60% of all connections to Ghacks while dialups are at about 2%.

That sums it up for now. Any other information that you would like to take a look at? Let me know and I might share it with everyone.

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Some information could give clues on where the Ghacks visitors come from, what browser and operating system they use, the speed of their Internet connection and if they brush their teeth every morning.

Countries and Languages do not contain any surprises. English is the language of the blog and visitors from English speaking countries make up the majority of visitors to Ghacks. Far more interesting is the browser distribution. More than 50% of all visitors use Firefox compared to less than 40% who use Internet Explorer. Opera and Safari are almost reaching the 4% mark.

More than 90% of all visitors to my website use a Microsoft Windows operating system, less than 6% a Apple Mac and less than 3% Linux. No real surprise looking at browser resolutions either. A quarter is running 1024×768 and roughly 20% are running 1280×1024 and 1280×800.

Hope you enjoyed this small piece of information. The most interesting figure is in my opinion that Firefox is way in front of Internet Explorer. This was not always the case. Internet Explorer led the browser pack back in February by a slight margin of 1% (IE 46%, Firefox 45%). If I look back one year it was leading by 10% (IE 51%, Firefox 41%)

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The biggest complaint I hear around however is over the fact Google Analytics doesn’t have any kind of ‘live tracking’ functions, statistics refresh just once per 24hours which can become a pain with time.

Enter Woopra.

Woopra is a real-time tracking service with a huge range of features and is also completely free at the moment, although premium services will eventually be available.

Woopra is also in private beta, although by signing up there’s a good chance you’ll be accepted fairly promptly. Current restrictions also include the number of websites you can have tracked for the beta.

Woopra is a desktop application, although a basic version exists online, nothing compared to Google Analytics however. I prefer using a desktop program however as they perform better, can have more intuitive interfaces and more advanced features.

The standout Woopra features include:

• Live Tracking
  Visitor tracking updated in real-time, dozens of other analytics updated several times a day. Live tracking is particularly useful for reacting to sudden events such as a Digg traffic surge etc.
• Rich User Interface
  Great UI combined with easy to use data representation tools and overlays.
• Multiple Site Monitoring
• Deep Analytics and Search Capabilities
  Huge range of data, all indexed for easy searching such as “Specific user names, IP addresses, geographic locations, user browsing data, visitor history, visitor paths, arrival and departure points”
• Instant Chatting
  A little creepy, but you can make a chat box pop-up in any site visitors browser. Not sure how many people would accept this and have a conversation.
• Visitor Tagging
  Recognise and monitor types of users and regular visitors.
• Real-time Notifications
  Define actions then receive notifications.
• Integration
  Integrate with WordPress (and other blog platforms) to get dashboard access to Woopra statistics. Also a wide range of developer tools enable plugins and applications to take advantage of the Woopra platform.

I highly recommend you giving this service a try!

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I used the free Web Page Analyzer script to test four settings and compare the results that were shown on the website. I did test the following settings:

• WP-Cache enabled, Google Analytics off
• WP-Cache enabled, Google Analytics on
• WP-Cache off, Google Analytics on
• WP-Cache off, Google Analytics off

Let me give you a few instructions about the images below:

Object Type refers to all files that belong to a certain type such as HTML or CSS files.
Size is the total size of all files that belong to a certain type.
Download T1 the total loading time for a T1 connection (1.54 Mbps) in seconds.

WP-Cache enabled, Google Analytics off:

WP-Cache enabled, Google Analytics on:

WP-Cache disabled, Google Analytics on:

WP-Cache disabled, Google Analytics off:

The results are quite obvious. Loading time is reduced quite a bit when I turn off WP-Cache and Google Analytics. The total loading time for a T1 connection is 1.86 seconds while it is 2.25 seconds if both options are turned on.

Users with slower connections will see a hugh decrease in total loading time in seconds which is absolutely what I wanted to achieve. There are however two aspects that I have to consider.

Turning off wp-cache reduces the loading time but increases the load on the server because mysql requests are not cached anymore. This could lead to troubles for sites that face lots of visitors, e.g. if your site makes it on the digg frontpage. I would suggest to turn on wp-cache again if that happens to be able to handle the load.

Turning of Google Analytics does not have any negative impact on your site but webmasters with no other statistics script have the problem that they do not have access to their statistics anymore. I’m using awstats instead of Google Analytics on my server. If you are unsure contact your webhost and ask which script they are offering.

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For those digital inspiration found a way to prevent that this data is sent to google for further analyzing. Whenever you visit a site that uses google analytics a small javascript file is downloaded to the visitors pc which reports the movement to google.

Now, to prevent this one simply has to add a line to his windows host file, which is located in system32/drivers/etc/host for windows xp and 2000 and in hosts/ for the other windows systems.

The line that needs to be added is

127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com

It redirects every request of www.google-analytics.com to 127.0.0.1 which is your own system. The script can´t find the js file and therefor nothing is reported.

Simply delete the line if you want to remove this again.

Technorati Tags: google, analytics, prevent, spy, analyse

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