Blended search is something that we feel many organizations and search marketers tend to ignore or at least put a little less priority on. It is interesting that this happens as we continue to see blended results dominate the SERPs for a given search query. Try a search in Google for iPhone or for haiti earthquake and take note of the the various types of blended search results that appear.
So then how does one track these blended search results? Using Google Analytics, there is a relative easy set up to gin understanding to know which type of listing a user clicked on. Was it a video, a news result, a website link or a blog link that appear on the same page of the search results. Want to kow which result the users engaged with? Try this:
Apply the following advanced filters:
Step 1:
- Create filter for organic traffic
- New filter ->
- Filter name `Organic`
- Filter Type -> Custom Filter
- Checked : include
- Filter Field: Campaign Medium
- Filter Pattern `organic`
Step 2:
- Create filter for All Universal Search traffic
- New Filter: ‘Universal Search Items
- Filter Type: Custom Filter
- Checked: Advanced
- Field A -> Extract A -> Referral -> (.*)oi=([a-zA-Z_]+)&(.*)
- Field B -> Extract B -> Referral -> (\?|&)q=([^&]*)
- Output To -> Constructor -> User Defined -> $B2 : $A2
In addition, you can also create separate filters for variations of the blended search items instead of selecting all of them:
Custom Step:
- Create filter for Universal Search - specific
- New Filter: ‘Universal Search | images’
- Filter Type: Custom Filter
- Checked: Advanced
- Field A -> Extract A -> Referral -> (.*)oi=image(.*)
- Field B -> Extract B -> Referral -> (\?|&)q=([^&]*)
- Output To -> Constructor -> User Defined -> $B2 : $A2
Great tips for those trying to monitor the blended search activity for various keyword results that feature blended results on the search engine results pages.Labels: google analytics, tracking blended search results |
