Redefining Keywords in Google Analytics

95% of the Google Analytics users across the world just work on this tracking code, without being ready to make any customization in the code. There are many features in Google Analytics code which can be modified to get a more neat and customized report. One such thing that I would like to share is the redefining of the Keywords in Google Analytics report. This is one of the interesting features of Google Analytics which helps to filter the keywords to a great extend.

Usually in the Google Analytics repot there is an option to view the list of the keywords. Keywords are those terms by which a visitor enters a site after entering them in search engines. The Keyword report gives you the list of all the keywords that have brought traffic. This includes both relevant and irrelevant keywords and phrases. At times you might want to remove certains keywords or phrases from the keywords report list. In this case you just want to treat the traffic from the removed keywords or phrases as direct traffic. Such an option is available in Google Analytics.

For example, consider a user typing your domain name yoursite.com in the search engine and this search phase is listed in the keyword report list. Here you can use the _addIgnoredOrganic() method to treat that keyword as direct traffic. You can also use the _clearIgnoredOrganic() method to clear out your keyword ignore list.

The general syntax of this function is _addIgnoredOrganic(newIgnoredOrganicKeyword). This sets the string as the ignored term for the keyword report list. This function can be used to configure Google Analytics to treat certain keywords or phrases as direct traffic. When you redefine your keywords in this manner the search terms are still included in your overall page view counts, but excluded from the keyword reports. The final syntax will be like this pageTracker._addIgnoredOrganic("yoursite.com"), where "yoursite.com" is the term to be treated as direct traffic.