As a search engine marketer, one of the most useful reports you can show to a client is an increase in non-branded traffic to their web site. This tells the client you are capable of getting their site ranked for keywords other than their brand mentions, and that the keywords you’re optimizing for are bringing in additional traffic to the site.
Now generating a true non-branded report can be complicated if the client has multiple brand terms. So here I’ll show you a little trick in Google Analytics which can help you pull this data without having to go into Excel to use multiple filters.
Start by selecting the proper profile and data range for your report.
Now select in the left navigation: Traffic Sources -> Keywords.
Make sure you select “non-paid”
Now you should have a list of all keywords driving natural search engine traffic to your site. Here you’ll want to exclude all branded keywords, so you’re left with the non-branded ones. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page, select “excluding” and enter your branded term inside the below field.
Now this takes care of a single brand, but what if your web site has multiple brands, or sub-brands or common mispellings? There isn’t an option to exclude multiple branded terms is there? There sure is! You see, that field accepts regular expressions, which means that you can use a pipe to add multiple filters.
This tells the program to, “exclude term1 AND term2 AND term3″ from the keywords. Once you have your refined list of keywords you can easily report on traffic, goals or whatever metric you desire.
Dan Cristo is a search engine optimization specialist at Zeta Interactive.
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Here’s another post on the same subject with some additional visuals http://leadgenseo.com/2009/01/08/excluding-keywords-in-google-analytics-this-or-that/
Thanks Dan. I’ve been wondering how to do this for a while. Great tip.
Thanks Dave. I too didn’t know about this little trick for quite some time. In fact, just last week someone asked me how to filter out multiple branded terms, and I told them to export the data into Excel.
Now I know better, and thought I would share it with everyone.
You can also setup an advanced segment that excludes branded keywords. If you are gonna pull this reports more than once, that’s a more efficient way to do it. Avanish Kaushik posted a great articles on how to do this and other ways to use advanced segmentation:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/10/google-analytics-releases-advanced-segmentation.html
Knowing how to properly dissect Google analytics will be crucial when it comes time to running reports for clients.
Bill – Thanks for sharing that link. It’s a bit lengthy, but worth the read.
Both this tip, and advanced segmentation method basically do the same thing. The difference is that setting up an advanced segment can be a bit intimating for casual GA users. The advantage of course is that you can save the segment for future applications, as well as apply the segment to all reports, as opposed to a single report.
It’s still good to know how to do both I think. Again, thanks for sharing.
Thanks and I agree. Both are useful. Just a moment ago I had the need to pull a list of non-branded keywords and your method is a good, quicker way of glancing at this data.
Hi Dan,
It’s very informative post, i’d applied it for my website.found it very useful. now i m going to share this information on my blog also.
Keep sharing.
@Bill – Yeah, this way is quicker, but doesn’t allow for “exact matches” which is too bad. Advanced segmentation is needed for that.
@Dipali – Thanks for the comment Dipali. I’ll continue to add new tips that I find.
Exactly what I was after – cheers for the tip Dan!
Nice…
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Thanks
This is a nice tool and almost everyday i use it. If you are working on SEO then you will also use it regularly to check if your site is optimized by your targeted keywords.
The common tool every webmaster must follow for SEO performance. Thanks to share with all.
Nice, Thanks
Thank you, You have created a beautiful page, search easily able to find what.
This tool is used by most of the people who is doing SEO.It really helps.
Google Analytics have been one of my favorite tools has a web developer
That’s handy. Thanks for sharing this.
Really well written and explained article !Keep us posted on Google Analytics !
thanks for your helpful tips.
It solved my problem
Have you managed to export this data? When I try to extract it into a csv file I get all keywords from my account, not the filtered list.
Good post Dan. Re: David Corman’s reply, ran into the same thing with exporting the filtered list. Anyone else experience this?
The advantage of this is that you can save the defendant segments for future applications,and apply the segment to all reports, as opposed to a single report.
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