Following up from the post yesterday >>

There was a follow up post on Blogstorm.  This post actually looked at the detail at the new URL structure and summarised that we (the SEO fraternity) might get some brand new data our PPC colleagues are all too used to.

Patrik Altoft suggests that

Perhaps the cd=7 (click detail = 7th?) is the ranking and ct=res (click through = results?) is indicating that the click came from organic search rather than a universal search (news or video) result.

Matt Cutts chimes in later on in a comment to this post.

I think if you do experiments, you’ll be able to confirm your speculation, Patrick and Brent Nau. As Jamie mentions, I think this is awesome for webmasters–even more information than you could glean from the previous referrer string.

So, watch this space !

Tags: Analytics, google, Tracking

On the official Google analytics blog they have pre-warned us all that they are making some changes to the referring string from Google natural search. You are OK, if you use Google Analytics, you will just need to do a software update.

Other wise depending on your particular set up you may need to make some changes. You can see their article here.

This will gradually roll this out. And the main difference they explain is the change from the part that starts “/search?” to “/url?”.

What does this mean? Well if you use this ‘search’ to determine that the visit is from natural search you need to make a change. Otherwise you will get confused between your paid and natural search results.

Now see part two >>

Tags: Analytics, google, SERPs, Tracking