Since long time every marketer using Google analytics has been wanting to track the actual rank of a keyword referring traffic to their website. It wasn’t really possible until Google changed the way they pass variables in the URL. With this change you can now track ranks of keywords referring traffic to your website right through the Google Analytics (Note: It does not track all the referrers because Google has still not implemented this change to all their data centers, So the data you gather should be used as a sample data only)

In order to set this up, you will have to follow the following steps:

1. Set up a new Profile – Let’s say you Call it “Google’s Keyword Rank Filter” for the account you want this enabled. (This is Important, else you might end up filtering your overall data)

2. Click on Edit and go to Filters, Click Add Filter to get started.

3. Filter 1

• Filter Name : Organic SERP Inclusion filter
• Filter Type : Custom Filter, Select Include from the radio buttons.
• Filter Field : Campaign Medium
• Filter Pattern : organic
• case Sensitive : No

4. Filter 2

• Filter Name : Google SERP Inclusion filter
• Filter Type : Custom Filter, Select Include from the radio buttons.
• Filter Field : Campaign Source
• Filter Pattern : google
• case Sensitive : No

5. Filter 3

• Filter Name : Google’s New Referral URL Filter
• Filter Type : Custom Filter, Select Include from the radio buttons.
• Filter Field : Referral
• Filter Pattern : google.(com|com.au)/(search|url).*\bcd=\d*        (Note: This example let’s you capture data from both google.com and google.com.au, You can increase or decrease the number of local google domains if you want.)
• case Sensitive : No

6. Filter 4

• Filter Name : Create ranking String
• Filter Type : Custom Filter, Select Advanced from the radio buttons.
• Field A -> Extract A

Drop Down Value = Referral,

Text Field Value =  \bq=([^&]*)

• Field B -> Extract B

Drop Down Value = Referral,

Text Field Value =  \bcd=(\d*)

• Output To -> Constructor

Drop Down Value = User Defined,

Text Field Value =  $A1 (Rank: $B1)

• Field A : required
• Field B : required
• Override output field : required
• Case Sensitive : Not required

7. Make sure that the filters are listed in the same order as they appear here, otherwise your data would not be captured correctly.

I hope this post is helpful to people wanting to track their keyword ranks.

Author is the CEO of a leading Web Design and Internet Marketing Company