Any idea on how to create a filter to remove AdWords “(content targeting)” bounce rates from my reports.

My content targeting bounce rates are very high, but at .05 a click, who cares. I am running ads on the content network for brand exposure only.

The high bounce rates are affecting my TRUE bounce rates and was hoping someone out there knew a quick fix.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Thanks,
-J

Full referrer URLs I just needed this filter. I was going crazy about the forums wich use the phpBB platform. You can never see the exact url where visitors came from.

But in most cases it’s major interesting to see what they wrote about you. :-)

Thanx…

Ps. how’s life?

BJ

Can filters to include only certain sub-directories be viewed in our main analytics report or do we need to create separate reports and then set up the include filter for that report e.g. can I view a filter report for /products in our main site or do I need to create a Products report and set the filter up? (clear as mud!?)

I’m afraid I cannot help you any further, but a good programmer probably does this with great ease. Good luck!

Thank you for a very interesting blog. I found it yesterday and have nearly read all your posts now :)

I have tried to apply your filter for Google Analytics so I can see what Adwords searchers really typed, and i have started seeing the first results.

But because the keyword data comes directly from the referrer, there is some URL encoded characters. In english I think the only problem is the spaces that are converted to “+”. But in Danish we have characters like æ, ø and å that are converted to “%C3%A6″, “%C3%B8″ and “%C3%A5″ and in Sweden and Germany there are different “problem characters”.

These characters make it hard to read the results. I have looked at the “find and replace” filter and tried letting it replace some of the characters, but it doesn’t seem to work.

Can you help me with this?

I’m guessing http://www.mysite.com?channelxyz stands for the URL within your website at the recieving end of a campaign. In many cases you want to have both linkpoints and campaign tracking, so there is something extra you need to do.

I won’t go in to everything with great detail, but the way I do it is the following:
- Linkpoints need to be focussed at one unique url. Separate tracking URLs with the same content will be filtered by search engines, so we need to 301 redirect to the one URL that can score. For instance the same url without campaign tracking information.
- Before returning a 301 header to a browser or searchbot, you cannot return any html or javascript. So you need to find another way to communicate a command to Google analytics. This is done by saving the campaign to session data (server side) with PHP or ASP. When the 301 redirect is executed, the recieving URL needs to check for session information and communicate it to Analytics. It should be communicated as campaign variables without using them in your url http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27248

Good luck

A question: If I am using a tracking URL of the format:

http://www.mysite.com?channel=xyz

Will the referring traffic filter you describe above track these specifically? Will it do so regardless of whether the link is placed on site xyz or typed directly into the browser?

Thanks again!!

–Craig

For the same period of time, I compared data obtained through each profile, in “Overall Keyword Conversion” statistics.

The number of clicks is not matching the data.

Let’s say you have only one keyword, in broad, like “kewyword 1″. The filtered list should contain all the combinations through which visitors comes to the web site - there are 40 of them. But, the unfiltered list contain 120 clicks for the broad match.

Where are the other 80 clicks? :(

Here it is in a separate text file: checkdomains.txt

I’m not sure if I get your question correctly. Do you want to “track 130 sites” or “separate 130 referers” in one account?

What you seem to be doing here is creating a separate account that just tracks traffic from any of the given referers. Excluding traffic from all other referers. But all this traffic is thrown onto one giant heap. For what purpose would you do such a thing?

If that is what you’re trying to do and you get only half the traffic you should get it is always good to see what referer string is returned by analytics. Throw the entire string into the user defined variable, by using a the “Full referrer URLs” custom filter I’ve demonstrated in this article. Then see if your regular expression catches all the referers it should catch or if there are exceptions that you need to tweak the expression for. (Perl regular expressions)

Because I wish for the text links to count for SEO purposes, I don’t want to add tracking variables into the href. Do you know how to isolate this traffic. Thanks in advance.

At the end of your post you list a possibility to view only adwords traffics in analytics. Can you describe what filter I need to set up to do just that?

When you don’t know what exactly a field returns, you can look at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27218 or test it by forwarding the raw information to the user defined field with a custom filter.

In the new or existing visitors case it is “New Visitor” or “Returning Visitor” without the quotes.

Is that about right or am I missing something?

This is why I adviced to use a second profile or place the data in an unused placeholder (like “user defined” or fake page requests in a specific directory)

I tested the reports in some of my accounts and these seem to be OK, but that is no guarantee. At the moment I have no idea what caused it.

Thanks for your posts on using Google Analytic filters to find out what the Adwords searchers really typed. I was really looking for a hack like this.

I’ve copied your screenshot, but… it doesn’t seem to work like it should.
I hope you can help:

When looking at my cpc-keyword report, the keywords are listed twice:
keyword 12.000 visits 50,2 pages/visit conversion 2,1%
Keyword, (keyword) 5.000 visits 1,3 pages/visit conversion 0%

When I look at the same report in my original profile the keyword is listed like this:
keyword 17.000 visits 28,8 pages/visit conversion 1,7%

Have you got any idea what goes wrong? For every keyword the listing with brackets show an average pages/visit between 1 and 2 and not even 1 conversion.

Have you got any idea what causes this?

Thanks in advance,
Arnoud