Google Analytics - Long keywords

[wedmonds]

Hi All,

Question for you Google Analytics pros.

In the keywords section of my account I see the various words that have been used to find my site.  The top entry shows a big long line of text from my site and I wondered why this appears on the keywords.

e.g  Lets say I had "Today I went to the shops and bought a football"

In the keywords I would normally expect to see 'football', 'shops' etc but instead I am actually seeing things like " went to the shops and bought a football".

What causing this?

Thanks all

[RyanKent]

You are seeing the search phrase used by someone to find your site.

If I go to Google, enter "Today I went to the shops and bought a football" and choose your site from the search results, you will see the above phrase as what was used to find your site.

The idea is by presenting this information, you may find some useful knowledge that can be used to improve your site. Perhaps you optimize a page for the new phrase, or maybe gain a better understanding of your visitor's needs.

[wedmonds]

Thanks for reply Ryan (again)

I understand the concept but its saying that I have had 43 searches for a big long sentence.  Who does searches for exact sentences?    Surely that cannot be right, can it????

[RyanKent]

Any chance you can provide a screenshot?

The information you are sharing certainly does not sound like a reasonable result.

[wedmonds]

Its difficult to give a screen shot as its for a client that I am helping out.

Need less to say within Google Analytics>keywords>it shows all the keywords that have been used to find the site in question.

So if you had your above answer on my site it may show something like:

1. The information you are sharing certainly does not sound like a reasonable result.

2. Information

3. Sound

4. etc

5. etc

Next to each one it shows the amount of hits and it shows about 50 hits next to number 1.

Very odd indeed.

[RyanKent]

On the left side of GA there is "Traffic Sources". Which source is being used?

The column that shows 4x hits, is it titled "Visits"?

The keyword should be a link. You can click on the link to view more details. Were all the visits the same day?

[wedmonds]

OK so on left hand side I see:

Traffic Sources>Keywords and then I click the big long entry:

The hits are all on different days over the last month or so.

Does that help?

[RyanKent]

My only suggestion is to see if any of the details on that entry stand out. It doesn't seem reasonable that anyone manually entered that long phrase repeatedly.

If anyone else has ideas feel free to chime in.

[KeriMorgret]

This is an oddball one! Have you yourself typed the phrase into Google to see if you can get any hints? Like maybe something where there was a trivia contest? Have there been any other searches that were similar but not quite exact to this search?

Do all of the searches come from the same city, and perhaps the same exact revision of Java or Flash? That might indicate they were coming from the same computer, and the same person kept typing the same query. I see that on one forum I run. The query won't be super-long, but it'll be the same query from the same city and the same software revisions on the browser each time.

[wedmonds]

Hi Keri, OK thanks i will try those suggestions.  I guess the more information I can gather will help identify the problem if there is indeed one

At least I have now learned that its not that common

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Wayne,

I'm following up on older questions that are still marked unanswered. Did you ever figure this one out? I'm curious to hear what happened here.