In my last post on Analytics Hints and Tips I wrote about how to discover rankings in Google Analytics which I hope everyone found useful. I will now continue this series with a very useful filter I use to discover the real terms that people entered the site with from Google AdWords.

This filter was once very useful when the Google AdWords search query report did not give out a lot of information (read more about the Search Query Report at http://atelier-seo.com/2010/05/save-money-on-your-google-adwords-with-the-search-query-performance-report).

But now that the report has been beefed up to include more search terms, this is still a very good filter to use from Analytics.

To explain more. When looking at your visitors from AdWords in Google Analytics, it will only show you the actual keyword that you are bidding on rather than the word that was typed in. For instance, if you are bidding on the keywords “Car Insurance” and someone found your site with the phrase “Cheap Car Insurance” then Google Analytics would only show you that the keyword “Car Insurance” was used, which whilst useful, doe not give you all the information. So this filter reveals that.

So, lets get started.

Create the First Filter:

Copy the image below, I have included the code below so you can highlight and copy it from here.

Field A -> Extract A: Referral = (?|&)(q|p|query)=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Medium = (cpc|ppc)
Output To -> Constructor: Custom Field 1 = $A3

Create the Second Filter:

Again, copy the image below:

Field A -> Extract A: Custom Field 1: (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Campaign Term: (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Campaign Term: $B1 ($A1)

Please Note:

The image previously put on this site stated that the second box should read Custom Field 2, when in fact it should have read Campaign Term. I apologise for this error and have changed the picture. My thanks to Dennis Cortes for making me aware of this.

So that’s that. Make sure then when assigning the filters to your new profile to place them in that order. This is really important.

Once your data has started to come through in a day or two, you should start to see something like this:

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