Today we’re looking at something that will teach you more about your customers. One of the most valuable uses for Google Analytics is being able to see which keywords people searched for in Google that went on to be a conversion. Today I’m going to run you through how you can go about this and on top of that I’m going to show you a trick on how to move past the (not provided) that you will probably run into. I’m going to assume that you have goals set up in Google Analytics, if not, then you should take a read of this article.

Please note that when I refer to a conversion, it’s the same thing as a goal.

Converting Keywords

The first thing we need to do is set up a custom report that allows you to drill down and extract the keywords that are leading to conversions. The process of doing this is as follows:

  1. Log into your Google Analytics account and navigate to your profile of choice.
  2. Select “Customization” in the orange bar, click on it and then select “+ New Custom Report”.
  3. Configure your custom report as per the example below and click the save button.

Time Saver: If you’re lazy, you’re welcome to click this link and it’ll automatically add the custom report above to your website profile on Google Analytics.

The screen that loads after you’ve saved the custom report shows you the sources of visitors who were converted on your website. You now want to click on the source of choice, “google” if it appears. Follow this by clicking on “organic” if it appears. (If neither “google” nor “organic” appear in the process, this means you haven’t had any conversions from people performing Google searches).

Now you’re left with a list of keywords that your converting customers searched for in Google. That’s incredibly useful information!

Getting Past the “(not provided)”

(not provided) appears instead of the keywords when a person that is logged into a Google service performs a search and arrives at your website. Google changed its privacy policy and decided that people logged into Google, their searches should remain private. But now what? We’ve created this custom report, but we can’t see what keywords people are looking for! No problem, here’s what you want to do:

  1. Look for “Secondary dimension” and click on it.
  2. Choose “Landing Page” from the list.
  3. Now, on the right of (not provided), you will see which pages your converting visitors arrived on.

From the landing page you might not be able to determine exactly which keyword a person searched for, but you could get an idea at least. For example, on our website there are a large number of (not provided)’s in our list, but when we add Landing Page as a secondary dimension, we can see that a large number of people landing on our SEO Services Page and we can therefore deduce that the keywords leading to a conversion revolve around topics such as “seo” or “seo Oklahoma City” or “Oklahoma City seo” and so forth, because those are the words we’re targeting on those pages.

Invaluable Information

This approach certainly doesn’t give you exactly which keywords are leading to conversions on your website, but it brings you as close as possible and assists you in understanding the nature of the keywords that are converting and through which areas of your website these conversions are taking place.

Invaluable information like this can be used to further your reach. For example, if we were getting conversions from people searching for “seo Oklahoma City”, for example, and when we Googled, “seo Oklahoma City” we saw that we were ranked in position 9, imagine how many conversions we would get if we moved up to position 1, 2 or 3!  The beauty of this approach is that we know that these keywords are converting, so we’re not guessing – the rule of more traffic will lead to more conversions is more than likely going to fit.

Google Analytics: Keyword insight through landing pages

Beyond finding out which keywords were bringing business to your website, I want to touch on a similar topic that will assist you in determining which keywords are performing well for you.

The first thing you want to do is fire up Excel and create a column for the landing pages on your website and a second column for the keywords that you are optimising for each landing page.

The next step is to open up your Google Analytics account and navigate to Landing Pages, which can be found under Site Content, which is under Content on the left. This report gives you a list of the landing pages on your website ordered by the number of visits received.

Finally, we want to take the list of landing pages and keywords, and link it up to the list of landing pages and the visitor counts. What we’re doing here is determining which landing pages are getting the most visits and in turn, taking a look at which keywords are potentially bringing the most traffic.

Bonus: If you create multiple columns in the spreadsheet to track month to month data, you could create a useful graph that maps out the traffic trends of the various landing pages, and that would give you further insight into which keywords are performing the best.

Because the “(not provided)” count is getting greater and greater, learning how to access useful information about your keywords is becoming more critical than ever.

Which pages on your website make the most money?

In the past few weeks we’ve been asked to assist various people with figuring out which landing pages on their website are leading to the most conversions. I decided to write up this so that the information is freely available to anyone who is interested.

A landing page is defined as the page that a person arrives on your website. People do not always arrive at your home page, they could arrive on an About Page, a Product Page or perhaps a Blog Post.

Knowing which pages lead to the most conversions (purchase, enquiry, download) allows you to direct more traffic to these pages through our marketing efforts or to use them as inspiration for other pages which aren’t converting as effectively.

The process of figuring out which pages are converting the most is not complicated and all you need is a Google Analytics account. Herewith are the steps:

#1 – LOG INTO GOOGLE ANALYTICS

The first step is to log into your Google Analytics account. 

#2 – CLICK ON CUSTOMIZATION

See that big orange bar that goes across your screen? Click on the “Customization” link.

#3 – ADD A NEW CUSTOM REPORT

Below the title, “Custom Reports” you’ll see the “+ New Custom Report”, give it a click.

#4 – SET UP THE REPORT

Type in a Title and Name, followed by selecting the Metric Group, “Goal Completions” and Dimension Drilldowns, “Landing Page”. Finally follow this with a click on the Save button right at the bottom and you’ll be presented with a list of your top converting landing pages. It’s as simple as that! 

In the report you’ll see a standard goal conversion explorer graph, but below that you’ll see the landing pages on the left and the number of conversions related to those landing pages. In other words, the number of conversions completed on the website by people who landed on these specific landing pages:

# – BONUS

In the diagram above you’ll see the “Secondary dimension” button, if you give this a click and select “Source” from the list that appears, this will take the report one step further and allow you to see where people who landed on these top pages came from. This then allows you to target these sources more which in turn will potentially lead to more conversions!

Let us know if you have any problems by leaving us a comment and we’ll assist as promptly as possible.