SEO Position Plus: Log Your Exact Google Rank with Google Analytics

Posted At : April 22, 2009 10:27 AM | Posted By : Andy Edmonds
Related Categories: search,analytics

We've been working hard on SEO Position over the last few months and the latest version has been in use by Stomper members for a while now.

With the announcement of updates to the Google referral string it's now important to update the script and there's some serious new features.

For those unfamiliar with the SEO Position script, in the picture above/right, the query "analytics motion charts" generated a click from Page 1 of the Google results while "motion charts" generated a click from Page 2.
SEO Position Plus tracks more types of referrals than the original script. All the categories logged to Google Analytics events are prefixed with SEO.

  • (Google | Yahoo | AOL | Live | MSN) Page: tracks page number of referrals from different engines
  • Google Site: Distinguishes subdomains & verticals like news, reader, corp, etc.
  • Google TLD: Find you average ranking by page number by Country
  • Google Images: Pull out keywords, traffic flow, etc. from Google image referrals

Mark at MivaMerchant wrote up a great tutorial (Stomper Members: See my video in the portal).

So that's all cool and useful, but the last item "SEO Google Position" captures the exact rank of the result clicked on Google to generate this visit. The announcement says the referral change is being rolled out and we're currently only seeing it for 1/10 to 1/40 of traffic.

I expect the data volume to increase and for this to provide much better data on ranking, ranking changes, and the ROI on ranking changes.

Here's what you'll get when a referral comes through with the new cd parameter:


The script is available at /abtest/includes/seopositionplus.js and is released as open source under the Mozilla Public License. Use it for free for whatever you like, but if you make it better, you have to share!

Place the script following your Google Analytics code/ Copy the SEOpositionPlus file to your server and add the following line beneath your call to pageTracker:

<script src="seopositionplus.js" type="text/javascript" language="javascript"></script>

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Jeremy Luebke's Gravatar This script is incorrect because most of the stories covering this have been incorrect in the parameter used. All the stories re-hashed what blogstorm.co.uk mentioned after initial observations. But the actual parameter reporting position is "resnum" not "cd". The "cd" parameter is reporting what position a sitelink is, not the real result.
# Posted By Jeremy Luebke | 4/23/09 12:40 AM
Jim MacKay's Gravatar Jeremy, I would respectfully disagree. The "resnum" and "cd" parameters you are seeing are probably coming from the old google.com/search? referrers. If you look at only the new google.com/url? referrers you will see that the "cd" parameter does in-fact correlate to exact rank position. Give the script a try. We are seeing excellent results on our sites.
# Posted By Jim MacKay | 4/23/09 6:57 AM
Mark Simon's Gravatar Very cool update and thanks for the mention :-)
# Posted By Mark Simon | 5/11/09 10:54 AM
Jussi Ruokomäki's Gravatar If I'm not mistaken, this script will distort bounce rate. Events count as actions, and thus people arriving from search engines will not show as bounces even if they leave immediately.

Otherwise, the script provides very useful information. Good job!
# Posted By Jussi Ruokomäki | 6/23/09 4:26 AM
Joao Correia's Gravatar Wow hands down. This is going to be useful.
I built myself a few scripts too, one to debug GATC and other to parse GA cookies. Check them out under Analytics.
# Posted By Joao Correia | 11/23/09 1:28 PM
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