How To Track Google Keyword Rankings In Google Analytics

Professional webmasters, and also many other website owners, need a way to keep track of keyword rankings of their website. Keyword ranking simple means the position in selected search engines of a website for a specific keyword. Ghacks is for example ranking on the first spot in Google, and probably in every other search engine out there, for the term ghacks. Many webmasters want to keep track of rankings to be able to analyze their website's performance and be ready for future optimizations to increase the traffic and thus the reach of the website.

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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