Google Analytics is a great tool for analyzing site traffic. In fact I was amazed at the level of detail, flexibility and complexity that was available in a free tool, even in comparison to some of the proprietary and in-house systems I’ve seen over the years.

Being based in the UK, and dealing with UK and European sites, one thing that has bugged me slightly is that Analytics doesn’t differentiate between the regional variations of referring Search Engines. 

In other words, if you have a bunch of traffic coming from Google, MSN, Yahoo etc,  Analytics will only tell you in the Traffic sources section that 1000 visitors came from Google, 1100 from MSN and so forth, without mentioning whether the source was google.ie, google.co.uk, msn.se. You just see the name of the Search Engine and total visitors without country differentiation.

Fortunately it looks like Brian Clifton over at http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com has come up with a pretty decent looking hack for this, and looking at his screenshots of the revised Analytics output, I think I’ll give the hack a go.

You can check out the solution here:  http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2008/09/14/customising-the-list-of-search-engines-in-google-analytics/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Google Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.