Using the new Google Eventing for SEO Reporting

I'm a huge fan of metrics about activities within a page like scroll depth or form abandonment analyses. Google Analytic's new eventing facilities (almost out of beta it seems!) enable this kinds of data logging and reporting.

Intro to GA Eventing

You get 4 slots of data to log to:

• Action
• Category
• Label
• Value

The official eventing docs describe an example for a Video action with categories for play/pause/stop and labels of the video name.

Ranking Insights

I've developed a script that enables ranking information to be logged to GA events. I pull the page offset (e.g. the start parameter) from the Google search referral string.

The reporting options are somewhat limited for events -- you can't pivot any report outside of the Event section by this data as of yet. It took a couple iterations to get the logging design to a useful point.

Rankings by Page

Using the Label report, we can see event data by Page with average rank (labeled "average value" in the data grid). The usage tab on this report will let you assess engagement by bounce rate and page views.

If you're logging multiple categories of events, you'll want to drill down to labels through the Google SEO category.

Rankings by Keyword

Using the drop down pivot to select keyword will get your average ranking per keyword, across all page.

Uh, Google...

Why did I have to write code to get this data? Hard to say, webmaster tools gives you some data on ranking position. This, along with accurate reporting of image search referrals should be built into google analytics.

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Get the Script

The script is a dozen or so lines of designed to be placed after your call to GA's pageTracker function. You do have to be running the new ga.js scripts, not the legacy urchin.js.

Copy the SEOposition file to your server and add the following line beneath your call to pageTracker:


The script is seoPosition.js and is released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The MPL is a friendly open source license allowing any type of use but requiring that enhancemnts to the existing file be contributed back to open source. This work was inspired by a filter hack from andrescholten.nl -- I didn't want to go through that trouble on every site. Thanks to DaveL @ E-Tail.be for calling my attention to this.