Search Engine Configuration in Google Analytics

[NOTICE: This post has been moved to the new SnapHawk Blog. Please click here to view the post in its new location.]

Today we share some tips and thoughts on using Google Analytics. We hope these are useful for you!
First, lets start with search engine configuration.

By default, Google Analytics identifies the following sites as search engine referrals. (Referrals from search engines not in the list are found under the Referring Sites report.)

Google	Netscape	Voila	Club-internet	Google.interia	Lycos	Mamma	Altavista
Yahoo	CNN	Virgilio	Mama	Szukacz	Ask	Alltheweb	Gigablast
MSN	Looksmart	Live	Seznam	Yam	Alice	Wp	Najdi
AOL	About	Baidu	Search	Pchome	Yandex	Onet	Netsprint

Then what about other websites? Is there any way to add them as search engine referrals in the report?

The answer is yes. You can add these websites by customizing your Google Analytics tracking code. You can use the _addOrganic() method to add additional search engines to the list.

The detail code is:

_addOrganic(newOrganicEngine, newOrganicKeyword)

Parameter "new OrganicEngine" here is the name of the engine.
Parameter "new OrganicKeyword" is the character or word used to demarcate the search string.

For example, when we search "SnapHawk" in Bing.com, we get "http://www.bing.com/search?q=snaphawk&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n".
In this case, we put "bing" as "newOrganicEngine" and "q" as "newOrganicKeyword" and then get the code for Bing.com:
Bing.com: pageTracker._addOrganic("bing", "q").

Pretty cool, right? Here are some other examples for your reference. Enjoy!

wolframalpha.com: pageTracker._addOrganic("wolframalpha", "i")
Bingtweets.com: pageTracker._addOrganic("bingtweets", "q")
Techorati: pageTracker._addOrganic("technorati.com","search")

Post by: Autumn Chen