VISTA Solution– Google Search Rank

Analytics · By On · 14 Comments

Omni­ture recently announced that it would offer a Com­pli­men­tary VISTA solu­tion to any com­pany that requested it, allow­ing Google nat­ural search page rank­ing to be passed into a vari­able when­ever it occurs in the refer­ring URL. This is the first time that Omni­ture has offered a VISTA solu­tion for no addi­tional cost, and my pri­mary sug­ges­tion is to take advan­tage of this oppor­tu­nity as I believe you will be able to gain sig­nif­i­cant value form these reports.

How you can get value from this com­pli­men­tary VISTA solution:

The rec­om­men­da­tion for the basic imple­men­ta­tion of this solu­tion is to place the nat­ural search rank­ing into a Cus­tom Traf­fic Vari­able (or “prop”). Then you will be able to look at your nat­ural search key­words report and break it down by the Google search rank prop using a cor­re­la­tion.   This will pro­vide you with all the nat­ural search key­words and the ranks that occur.

First thing to remem­ber: when you are set­ting up the prop make sure you also set up the cor­re­la­tion between your nat­ural search key­words and the search rank prop. With­out this you will not be able to see which key­words resulted in which rank within SiteCatalyst.

Warn­ing! The fol­low­ing para­graph is an advanced concept:

If you really want to squeeze the most out of this com­pli­men­tary solu­tion, here is my suggestion. Use Omni­ture Dis­cover, Data Ware­house, or ASI to break­down by Pages > Search Rank > Key­word.  (You might also want to break down Pages > Key­word > Search Rank,  whichever you pre­fer).  You may also take another approach and seg­ment by key pages or by nat­ural search rank­ing to get this data bro­ken down in pow­er­ful ways. These break­down reports will show you how pages are rank­ing rel­a­tive to their keywords.

If you don’t have Dis­cover, Data Ware­house, or ASI then have your sup­ported user con­tact Omni­ture Client Care or their Omni­ture Account Man­ager and request to have a 5 item cor­re­la­tion enabled.  Ask to  cor­re­late Pages with Search Rank prop and nat­ural search key­words.  You will only be able to see pageviews from this break­down but the value is there.

How you can get the MOST value from this com­ple­men­tary VISTA solution:

Have the VISTA solu­tion place the search rank into a prop and a Con­ver­sion Vari­able (or “eVar”). You will be able to take your key­words, break them down by the search rank and pull in met­rics such as rev­enue, orders, units and any other con­ver­sion events. Com­par­ing key­word search rank directly with con­ver­sions will give you a full pic­ture. Any actions you make will be well informed because they include con­ver­sion met­rics which is what you want to con­cen­trate on.

Exam­ple: You take your Uni­fied Sources key­word eVar and break it down by search rank. You pull in met­rics such as rev­enue, form com­ple­tion and email list sign-ups (assum­ing you are set­ting those events). You scan through the reports and find key­words that have a poor rank­ing but a high con­ver­sion rate. You will imme­di­ately know that the key­word is one you should con­cen­trate on for you SEO and even make sure it is part of your paid campaigns.

How­ever, this will only rea­son­ably work if you have the Uni­fied Sources Vista solu­tion. If you don’t have it already, then take a cou­ple min­utes to look over my post on Uni­fied Sources. You will def­i­nitely be able to gain huge returns on your invest­ment.  And I believe you will see even more returns by com­bin­ing this com­pli­men­tary VISTA solu­tion with Uni­fied Sources.

It may seem obvi­ous that plac­ing the nat­ural search rank­ing into an eVar as well as a prop is bet­ter than putting it into just a prop. But more data is not always bet­ter data; plac­ing the search rank­ing in an eVar has lim­ited use­ful­ness if you don’t cor­re­late the rank with key­words. And the only way you will be able to do that with an eVar is if you have an eVar that con­tains your nat­ural search key­words. This is what the Uni­fied Sources VISTA solu­tion accomplishes.

Note on the cre­ation of the solution:

If you fol­low my blog (sub­scribe here), then you know my team is the team that builds VISTA solu­tions.  A point to remem­ber is the Google Search Rank solu­tion is a cus­tom devel­oped solu­tion (like every­thing the Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices team does).  So, you will need to con­tact your account man­ager and get an agree­ment in place.

This solu­tion will only be com­ple­men­tary to the end of Sep­tem­ber, which means you need to sign the con­tract before Oct 1, 2009 or you will need to pay the stan­dard VISTA solu­tion pricing.

As always, post your com­ments or e-mail me at pau­rigemma (at) omni​ture​.com.  It is your com­ments and e-mails that keep me post­ing and give me ideas for future posts.  If you do decide to pur­chase an Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices solu­tion,  make sure you men­tion the blog and you will get white glove treat­ment.

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  • Aaron

    Hi Pearce, thanks for your post, I will pur­sue this with our account man­ager. Quick ques­tion, can the VISTA rule pop­u­late the val­ues into mul­ti­ple report suites? ie. a global report suite and a child report suite?

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      Aaron,
      The sim­ple answer is Yes.

      The long answer is to say that a VISTA solu­tion sits on top of a report suite, so if you want the VISTA solu­tion to set val­ues on more than one report suite you sim­ply need to request to have the solu­tion placed on each addi­tional report suite. You do this as part of the agree­ment, so when you are work­ing with your AM make sure to pro­vide them with a list of all the report suites you want the VISTA solu­tion placed on.

      Just a quick heads up, after the project is con­sid­ered com­plete (after the solu­tion is pro­moted to pro­duc­tion) it will cost a copy request to have the solu­tion placed on more report suites.

  • Dan Cross

    Hey Pearce,
    I man­aged to get this imple­mented on a few sites a cou­ple months back, and have essen­tially sat and watched those num­bers com­pile, won­der­ing how to really use the data well. I appre­ci­ate this post, but have a tech­ni­cal snag… hop­ing you can shed some light.

    It was sug­gested on ini­tial imple­men­ta­tion of this VISTA rule that we cap­ture search rank in an eVar rather than an sprop. So now this data isn’t avail­able for cor­re­la­tion. Since this eVar isn’t cap­tured on-page, I can’t equate an sprop to the evar con­tain­ing the search rank. Any ideas on how to deal with this? Thanks!

  • lg

    Hi Pearce,
    Just wanted to clar­ify if this is for page result rank or search result rank (page 1 ver­sus posi­tion 1 on page 1). There is a report called “All Search Page Rank­ing” that is for which page of the results my list­ing was on. But it sounds like this VISTA rule will cap­ture where in the total list­ings my link was when clicked on, is that correct?

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      lg,
      You are cor­rect, it is the absolute search rank.
      This will not cap­ture what page the search was on only it’s over­all rank. So assum­ing there are 10 results per page and the Google Search rank is 13 then that would mean it is the third result on the sec­ond page.

  • Phil

    Is this an add-on to VISTA or is the VISTA Solu­tion Free?

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      It is a com­plete devel­oped solu­tion that is given away com­pli­men­tary (Free). :)

  • julian

    Hi,

    Can you give a lit­tle more detail on how the pager­ank is col­lected? My under­stand­ing was that only in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions does Google pass the pager­ank through the refer­ring URL eg: in FF when # is in the orig­i­nal search query

    Also can this solu­tion be used to col­lect site link data when Google shows a rich result snip­pet in it’s organic results?

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      Julian,
      The page rank is col­lected from the query string from the refer­ring URL. You are cor­rect in that the value is not there for most searches so the VISTA solu­tion can only grab the value when it sees it in the refer­ring URL. I am not aware of an actual sit­u­a­tion such as a # in the orig­i­nal search.

      The com­ple­men­tary solu­tion only cov­ers the search rank, how­ever the rule can be expanded to grab other para­me­ters form the query sting such as the oi= but that addi­tion would be sub­ject to stan­dard VISTA fees.

  • lg

    Would you hap­pen to know in gen­eral what instances Google pushes the rank in the query string? I have the rule in place now and just needed to get an idea of what level of Google refer­rals will be reflected in the reports. Thanks!

  • philip

    I have the same ques­tion as Ig — how often is the rank included in the URL? (what % of all searches from google?)

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      From what we know most clients are see­ing page rank data for less than 15% of their search results. Google did say they would be increas­ing the instances but that does not seem to have hap­pened. Also, we do not know the exact sit­u­a­tion that causes Google to use the advanced URL parameters.

  • Jils

    How can we track the sitelink posi­tion for Google Organic Searches?

  • http://www.connetu.com/ Paul Web

    Thanks Pearce for the infor­ma­tive post. This is some really good news. It’s great that Com­pli­men­tary offers a Vista solu­tion for no extra cost and it’s time for us to take advan­tage of this too. But how is it pos­si­ble to track the site link posi­tion for Google Organic Searches?