Customising the SEO list for Google Analytics
What this Plugin does
Aimed at digital marketers running SEO accounts where regional differences are important. For example, Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Australia. This JavaScript plugin, written by Brian Clifton, separates out 264 regional search engines – for example, google.co.uk, google.com, google.co.nz etc. – instead of just “google” as reported in GA by default. Read the blog post.
- Tracks visitors from 189 regional Google domains – and their keywords
- Tracks visitors from 30 regional Yahoo domains - and their keywords
- Tracks visitors from Google Maps, News, and Video search - and their keywords
- Tracks visitors from 46 other search engines tracked that are not available in GA:
- e.g. BBC, Tesco, Kelkoo, Maktoob (Arabic), Naver (Korea), HotBot, zinza (Arabic), Rambler (Russian), others…
- Adds price comparison engines kelkoo.com, pricegrabber.com
- NOTE: These are all in addition to the GA defaults, that has 40 search domains
- See the full list of detected search engines
Also try this with the Auto-Tracking File Downloads & Outbound Links plugin.
Usage
- For use with ga.js (async) only.
- The list of tracked search engines and domains and associated code is regularly updated. All subscribers will be notified of updates via email.
- Last code update: April-2011
- Purchase the plugin to receive the JavaScript file (from £48)
- Upload the .js file into your website root directory (used in this example) or other suitable place
- Modify all your web pages (once only change) to reference the .js file above your Google Analytics Tracking Code. Then add the complete line shown below that contains the “//set custom search engines” comment. This must be placed on the line above your
_trackPageviewcall - That’s it… Or perhaps you thought there was more!
Example GATC – just two lines to add (#1 and #6):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | <script type="text/javascript" src="/custom_se-async.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-N']); addCustomOrganic(_gaq); // set custom search engines _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); </script> |
Allow at least 4 hours for your new search engines to be reported in your GA account. To view these, log into your Google Analytics account, select the Search Engines report and view the enhanced detail – as per below:

Updates
By subscribing to this hack you will be notified when the list of detected search engines is updated. Then all you need to do is replace your .js file with the new one. No page or GATC changes required.
Feedback
As always, I appreciate feedback. Also, feel free to suggest new search engines to be added to the list. Also, check out the Auto-Tracking File Downloads & Outbound Links plugin.


April 18th, 2011 at 7:02 pm
Thanks Brian for a great tip, even non-developers like me should be able to pull this off:)This is really important for a multi-international site when it comes to SEO.
May 11th, 2011 at 8:03 am
I haven’t noticed the difference between the sources details of search engine organic and referral before your sharing, thanks.
May 12th, 2011 at 4:43 pm
Robert/Nick: Thanks for feedback. I would be interested to hear of any benefits to your SEO campaigns once this is implemented.
June 7th, 2012 at 11:19 am
Can you let me know how often the plugin is updated. We’re looking to roll it out onto one of our clients sites and it’s a question they had.
Can you also let me know if the plugin detects traffic from people who are using search engines on sites such as Tesco, Orange, Virgin Media etc
June 7th, 2012 at 12:18 pm
@Charles – the full list of search engines detected is shown here: http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/search-engine-list/ (also referenced in the above post). If you look at the UK section, you see Tesco and Orange are listed, though I do not have Virgin. I would be happy to add that. A new update is due over the summer. Let me know if there are any others you would like to see on there.
June 11th, 2012 at 10:13 am
@Brian – I’ll post a list later today.
If a client is running multiple domains on one server, am i correct in thinking we need the multi-site licence
June 11th, 2012 at 11:04 am
@Charles: Licensing is based on the number of domains. It does not depend on sub-domains and does not matter if different servers. So sub1.domain1.com and sub2.domain1.com are one license, but sub1.domain1.com and sub1.domain2.com require a multi-license.
December 2nd, 2012 at 9:41 am
google.co.th seems to be supported. I’ll give it a try right now !