Monitoring traffic from search engines

Search engine tracking allows you to monitor the amount of page views received from visitors who found the website using a search engine. Since search engines are the most common type of referring websites, the system tracks them separately.

Viewing search engine statistics

To access the report containing search engine data:

  1. Open the Web analytics application.
  2. Select the Traffic sources -> Search engines report.

The report contains a graph displaying the total amount of page views generated by search engine traffic and a breakdown of the statistics for individual search engines.

Monitoring the website’s visitor traffic generated by search engines

Note: The Search keywords report (also located under the Traffic sources category) does not track keyword data for most major search engines. Modern search engines do not provide publicly available keywords in their referring links.

Before they can provide search results that link users to your website, search engines index the site using web crawlers (robots). Web analytics are also capable of tracking crawlers on your website’s pages. You can view the results in the Visitors -> Search crawlers report.

Tracking the activity of search engine crawlers on the website

The data provided in the search crawlers report can be useful when performing Search engine optimization of your website.

Tip: You can also check search engine statistics for specific pages by selecting the corresponding page in the Pages application and viewing its Traffic sources reports on the Analytics -> Reports tab.

You can ask your administrator to manage search engine objects in the Search engine application. See Managing search engines for web analytics for more information.