I'm trying to use Google Analytics API to query internal searches that happen on my site.
I'd like to be able to query the keywords and the number of times that keyword was used in internal search, based on URL of a page on the site. The idea is to find out which keywords direct the user to a particular page.
Does anyone know which dimensions and metrics must use to query that information?
The information you are talking about is in the "Site Search Terms" Report.
First, you need to set up Site Search. This is straightforward. A step-by-step explanation is on this GA Help Page.
Once you've done that, you just need to know how to access the Report.
From the first page after GA login, select a Profile from the "View Reports" menu in the upper left-hand corner of the page
On the left-hand side of the page (in the margin) click "Content" (the fourth item in the list of Dashboard pages) which will expand the items subsumed under the Content section
"Site Search" will now appear in the margin below "Content"
Click "Site Search"; the Report will have three tabs: (i) Site Search Usage; (ii) Goal Conversion; and (iii) Ecommerce. Obviously, most of the information you are interested in is in the first tab.
Once the search tracking is set up as per doug's answer, the dimension is ga:searchKeyword, and the metric you need is ga:searchUniques (and you probably want to sort by -ga:searchUniques). I've checked this against the GA web report & it matches up - the documentation in the GA API Query Explorer isn't really clear on what the ga:searchUniques really counts.
Related
I have seen some sites where you search (in Google) for a particular item category and when you click the link found in Google it automatically goes to the site clicked with the search criteria filled in displaying the categorised products.
Hypothetical Example
Go into Google type in Sony TV , click to search.
Results are displayed.
Clicking one of the links takes me to a website which shows all the Sony TV models beginning with AA.
Looking at the search options on the page some fields have been automatically filled in (in other words if you did this search manually the site would prompt you to enter some search criteria) - Not sure if this is relevant but thought to mention.
How is this done? Do i need to setup something in our Google account to get the same results?
It's fairly simple. You pass parameters in your URLs that identify the product, and then you just read the URL parameters when pre-populating the search form on the page. When building your site / sitemap / internal & external links you use those page URLs and Google will naturally pick them up.
In your example, you search for Sony TV. One of the results may be
example.com/index.php?product=sony-tv
The website has the variable sony-tv, which it gets from the URL and pre-populates on the search form.
The important part to note is that the site will have built its URL structure in this method typically and the page you're presented with just happens to look like the site dynamically searched based on your query (it hasn't).
I have set up my google+ account with everything linked to my website, my website linking to Google+ as per instructions, but photo is not showing in search results, even though the google testing says all is fine.
My site is www.mikegeorgiades.com (Google+ link code in homepage).
My Google+ page is https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/105269586899946171489/+Mikegeorgiades-guitarist-for-hire
Is there any reason why the test would appear OK but not for real? Is there a lag? Thanks!
that can have multiple reasons:
On their help pages the Google guys wrote that "Your Google+ profile picture should be a good, recognisable head-shot". When you browse the web via Google’s search engine you probably see a lot of images which do not show “good, recognisable head-shots”. I think it belongs to Google whether the picture shows up or not.
Google Authorship does not work when you link to a Google+ business page instead of a real profile page.
You did not add a link back from your site to your Google+ page (see this help page (Option 2)).
Your author info is hidden to the public. Google don't like hidden stuff. Make sure that your reciprocal backlink is not hidden via CSS.
Very obvious: Your Google+ profile has no profile picture.
Your site is cached and the backlink is not yet integrated into the source code. Try to clear your cache.
Your backlink is missing the rel="author" attribute.
Your backlink is missing the ?rel=author attribute in the URL (ex. href="http://plus.google.com/u/0/123456789/?rel=author")
Check that your E-Mail Address (if added to your Google+ profile) is on the same domain as your content (read more about it here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986)
Make sure that the byline of your content includes the same name as in your Google+ profile. For example: When your Google+ Profile is "John Doe" your byline has to be "By John Doe" and not "By Doe John" or anything else.
You have not submitted your E-Mail address via this page: http://plus.google.com/authorship
Your Google+ profile is not visible to the public.
Your Google+ profile has been excluded to the search (so no one can find you via Google`s search engine).
There are multiple authors on one page. Google always uses only the first author that has been mentioned on a page.
You did not add your website to "Contributor To" section (click here to do that now: http://plus.google.com/me/about/edit/co)
The "Contributor To" section is not visible to the public.
The Rich Snippet Testing Tool throws errors (even if they are not related to authorship)
Last but not least: Google just does not want to display your profile picture
Update 1: More reasons can be:
Some users said that it also won't work when your website was not confirmed as yours in Google Webmaster Tools.
Some said that they got it to work after adding the same URL in Google+ as in Google Webmaster tools (Within Google webmaster tools you can setup the preferred domain (www or non-www).)
I'm not working at Google but I think when the Rich Snippet Testing Tool shows your picture it should appear in search results after some days.
Update 2: One more:
You have deactivated the option that noone can find your picture in Googles search results. To solve this go to https://www.google.com/settings/plus and scroll down to the "Profile" section. Activate the checkbox beside "Help others discover my profile in search results." (in German this is: "Andere sollen mein Profil in Suchergebnissen finden können").
Update 3: One more:
John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst # Google) announced that in the near future Google will not longer show the profile picture in search results. Instead it will show up on Google News only. However the name will still show up on search results pages. Preview image can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1408986
I recently experienced my photo disappearing from the search results and I, too, verified that everything else was correct under the structured data testing tool. At first my photo snippet was showing in the SERP but then it vanished. I was also trying different profile photos. I had one with dimensions of 400x400 pixels and another one with dimensions of 256x256 pixels. I didn't fully verify it, but Google apparently didn't like my 400x400 photo. Google wants a clear profile photo of your face. Perhaps some algorithm found my larger photo too grainy or something along those lines. Changing my photo back to the 256x256 version caused my photo to reappear in the search results! I'd suggest trying different dimensions, different photo formats, perhaps even changing the color profile. The search results were updated fairly quickly after I uploaded a working photo. Seems like I saw results in under an hour, YMMV.
You can refer to the photo I used, along with my Contributor to links, at my Google+ page at https://plus.google.com/108810746834291116055. The page that I have my authorship set at is http://blog.ikiapps.com using rel=author.
Update on 2014-Apr-27:
I can confirm my advice worked for me again after completely changing my Google profile to another account and losing the visibility of my authorship associated photo in search results for a brief period of time. It is now restored after following what I posted here.
I just found out that Google recently decided to start using their own "title" when they display their search results. Also, after checking Yahoo and Bing I saw that the way they are displaying their results are the same but in completely different way than Google.
I guess my question would be, if there is an actual "correct" way of adding titles to my pages in order for Google to display what I want them to and this way get the same results with Yahoo/Bing that are currently using the page's title as a search result (sometimes they pick up the first tag and use it as title).
Any recommendations or links to follow for more studying would be appreciated.
There's nothing you can really do about it. Google will choose what title to display based on criteria they have not made public. This usually is the page's title as found in the <title> tag but if Google feels a different title better summarizes the page's content they may choose to display something else.
You can try to change your page titles to better reflect the page's content and see if that helps.
Using optimal keyword prominency in meta tags according to guidelines... and Google will pick up your meta tags. See our news portal's source and metas (keywords: hírek, választás 2014, etc.): http://valasztas2014.hir24.hu/
I would need to have a personalized summary links web part in a given page.
So when a user logs into the site, he should see his own links as opposed to system wide links inside the links web part.
Is it possible to have a personalized summary links web part?
How would that work?
Thanks in advance.
W
Here's what you can do:
Add a User column to a standard links list.
Create a new view that shows only links of current user (use [Me] marker as column value in filter).
Modify the Web Part to use the new view.
do you know how google recovers the description of a website in their search results? is it the meta-description? the first paragraph?
Their algorithms aren't officially released to the public, but if there is a meta description tag, it takes that. Otherwise it generally depends on where the keywords lie within the body of the webpage. If someone is searching for "foo", a paragraph with foo in it will likely appear, with foo highlighted in bold.
Search Engines (including Google) crawl through the first introductory paragraph of the page or a post and takes that excerpt to put in the description when search results are shown. But there's a protection measure that one should take to be SEO friendly. If you are starting your page/post with an image, it negatively affects the SEO of that page because the search results are in text form and for that search engines won't understand the format of the image since they want a text description. In case of WordPress, use All IN One SEO Pack Plugin to manipulate the description if you are starting your post/page with an image.