Friday, July 22, 2011

Google Analytics, Derivatives of my Name, Useless Data!

Here's my pet peeve about analytics which I wish they would fix. I'm ranting again because I just read that Google has extended Analytics into social media tracking (generally, a great idea!) but have not fixed this basic but important item.  Grrrrr.

I like to look at the percent of my traffic that comes from natural search vs say direct.   Natural search suggests that they use some keyphrase but then up on my site (bless them).

But over half of the "natural seach" that Google reports is people entering some derivative of my domain name into the search bar as a lazy-mans way of getting to my site.  So the data becomes meaningless until I manually massage it.

 I'd like Google to help me out here but dedicating a little programming resources to having an automated way that I can select variations of my name and henceforth see them in the direct data, not the natural search area.

While this is not so intellectually exciting as analytics for social media, it would be useful!

No comments: