Clean Ranking Report Reloaded

I just updated my original Clean Ranking Report in Google Analytics post fixing and improving a number of things.

I still can’t figure out how I messed up in the first place, but I figure it must have been because I was running about 6 different test profiles trying different ways of cleaning up the report. I must have gotten them mixed up somehow because I know I had it working.

Once I had worked out how to clean up the ranking report, I erased all the unnecessary profiles and filters, so I didn’t have any way of retracing my work.

Changes

I changed the Search Ranking filter’s Field A->Extract A to use Campaign Term instead of Referral. The search terms from the Campaign Term field look a lot prettier than those from the Referral field.

I was really surprised this worked because Campaign Term is also used to track PPC bid terms. If you are using broad match in your PPC campaign then your bid term won’t necessarily match the search term.

Of course none of this is set with organic traffic, but it doesn’t seem like an intuitive place to put this information.

I was having all sorts of trouble getting Google Analytics to match parenthesis. Yes, I know how use the escape character. No, it didn’t work.

So instead of beating myself over the head, trying to get everything to work with the parenthesis intact, I changed the Search Ranking filter’s Output To->Constructor to get rid of the parenthesis. This makes formatting later a lot easier and, if you really want to see the page number in parenthesis, you can probably add them back in with your Search and Replace filters.

The Search and Replace filters are completely revamped. Not only do they work now, but I also got rid of some unnecessary characters. I also used Google-friendly end of string anchors in my regular expressions which might not have any benefit to you, but they match more efficiently saving processing power.