Monday, June 01, 2009

Adding “bing” to Organic Search in Google Analytics

A while ago I wrote blog post on how to add Twitter searches to appear in organic searches. The same principal can be applied to include Microsoft’s new search engine “bing” which is not yet recognized by Google Analytics as a search engine. Till Google Analytics recognizes it as a search engine, you can capture the data in organic searches by a simple one line of code.

GA provides the following function to allow you to add your own search engines to the list of search engines that are already tracked by GA.

_addOrganic(newOrganicEngine, newOrganicKeyword)


You simply call this function right after var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X"); to track any custom search engine.

NewOrganicEngine is the words that identify the search engine; in this case we will use “bing.com”

newOrganicKeyword is the query string that contains that keywords, in this case it will be “q” as “bing” uses “q” as the query string that contains the keyword.




Here is how your final code will look like

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X");
pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com", "q")
pageTracker._trackPageview();


Questions? Comments?

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4 comments:

  1. Is this a one-hit thing? Do we need to leave this call in our Google Analytics tracking tag forever? Shouldn't Google pick up new search engines as large as Bing on its own?

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is a work around till google analytics adss bing to it's list. You should remove it once google adds it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. thank u for this wonderful article on web analytics

    ReplyDelete

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