As you may have heard, bing.com is the new search engine from Microsoft. Although tracking bing.com visitors in Google Analytics will take place automatically, the caveat is, that at present it is reported as a standard referrer – as if a link from another website. That means it is not grouped with other search engines in your reports and no keyword information is available.
This update allows you to track Bing.com as a search engine in Google Analytics with visitor keyword detail.
April 2011 – New async hack launched
This hack has been completely revised for the latest GA async code. Further info >>
Background
Search still has a long way to go in helping people efficiently find information other than for product search, so reading the Bing press release certainly caught my attention. Also see my latest post tracking regional search engines.
Although Google will no doubt apply a bing.com fix in the near future, the “Tracking regional search engines” hack is a script that allows you to define your own specific list of search engines for Google Analytics. For example, by default, Google Analytics groups all Google organic searches a ‘google / organic’. But what if you wish to separate google.com versus google.co.uk versus google.cn and all the other country specific domains? This hack enables this and allows you to define other regional specific engines such as naver.com (Korea), Eniro.com (Sweden) etc. In fact, over 100 regional specific search engines are now included, and you can easily add your own (or ask me to add them here!).
The Bing hack for Google Analytics
Using the script is straight forward – simply call it in your GATC before the function call _trackPageview(). For example, a modified GATC is as follows:
Don’t forget to change to your account number (UA-123456-1). If you are using the legacy urchin.js GATC, refer to the corresponding script in the Hacks section of this site (Hack #2).
Your Traffic Sources > Search Engines report will then look something like this:
As always I appreciate your comments/feedback, or a quick rating by clicking on the stars.
© Brian Clifton for Successful Analytics - the new Google Analytics book, 2009. |
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Post tags: bing, bing.com, search engine, search engine optimisation, search engines, seo