Use More Than 5 Custom Variables in Google Analytic Tracking Script

Ophir Prusak's blog Analytics Impact shared how to set up the tracking script to allow more than 5 custom variables. I can think of a dozen of data points that I wanted to log and could not because of the limit mentioned in the help document. Here is the link to his blog.

Analytics Impact - Get more than 5 custom variables in Google Analytics

Search ranking in Google Analytics

The filter that logs the value of the ranking variable(cd) in the Google organic search works.

1. track the ranking movement of keywords daily or weekly or monthly
2. provides insight for long tail keywords that rank high in search results

Need to find a way to automate this process instead of exporting the list every day or every week.
I can see there is a lot of potential in this.

First Touch Keyword

Got referred to a blog about keyword attribution and it has a script to collect first touch keyword in GA.

Finally got that working in GA today. Custom variables only allows 64 characters. Because the values are url encoded, blank spaces are turn into 3 characters (%20).

I thought what a waste of valuable characters. So I tweaked the code and replace %20 with an underscore. This makes the custom keyword readable in GA and allows more useful characters to be logged in GA.

Read my tweak to the script here

Mystery of zero visits in Google Analytics solved

Keywords report has some keywords with zero visits! Is this a mistake?

After Googling around and found the answer in varies blogs. If the visitor did a second/third/fourth/...etc. search within 30 minutes and arrived at our website again, the second/third/fourth/...etc. search keywords will be logged but the visits count will go towards the first keywords.

Here are some of the blogs that covers this issue.

http://www.yoursearchadvisor.com/blog/google-analytics-keywords-with-zero-visits/

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=0d04370f123bc16c&hl=en

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/advanced-google-analytics

Live optimization

Watching Live Optimization from Marketing Experiment. It has a lot of nuggets in how to tweak web pages to rank higher in searches. Some quick points:

1. For establish websites, put the brand last in the page
2. domain name that has keywords 
3. keywords in url path
4. listed in directories like Yahoo!directory
5. content development

Some of the things I have read bits and pieces from blogs but have not seen how it is done. This webinar provided me a concrete examples of what should be done for SEO. Highly recommended for someone trying to get their heads around SEO.

How to improve your SEO clicks and conversions

Will start applying some of the thing I picked up to discount dental plan