Keyword Analysis by Number of Terms (google analytics trick)

I learned a cool trick you can do to get calculate the number of terms that are in keywords for organic searches to your site. You can use this to determine, say, if there are more people signing up that found your site using a 3 term search.

- Go to Traffic Sources - Keywords
- At the bottom put in this regex in the 'Find Keywords' form: ^(\W*\w+\b\W*){3}$
- Click GO

This will give you keywords that have 3 terms in them. Change the number at the end of the regex to get the stats on terms with 1,2,4,5... etc. I don't recommend doing this for a large amount of time on a lot of keywords. This will also not account for .'s or -'s.

Here's some output of my stats from the last month:
Terms Visits Pages/Visit Time Bounce %Forum Register
1 6461 1.88 0.56 74.37 0.17
2 85241 2.22 1:23 67.76 0.71
3 153216 2.24 1:40 67.26 0.45
4 118181 2.03 1:32 67.61 0.34
5 76239 2.02 1:40 68.06 0.33
6 42497 1.84 1:27 69.77 0.25
7 25110 1.88 1:36 69.59 0.25
8 15045 1.82 1:34 69.76 0.19
9 9109 1.77 1:29 70.83 0.1
10 5619 1.8 1:37 69.6 0.12

So this tells me that people are finding what they need when using 3 keywords, but are registering more when using 2 keywords. At 1 and >8 they are not finding what they need at all. 1 keyword is mostly misspellings and flukes in my case anyway. If you have a lot of 1 keyword searches with high turnover you're doing something right! This also tells me that I need to work on getting more people to sign up!

Joe, thanks for the lengthy analysis. I was about to go to bed when I wrote that last night. hah

So yeh, you're absolutely right.

One stat I might throw up later is the actual number of different terms. The 'visits' could be multiple hits from the same user, like you said, clicking back, checking other sites, and then coming back again. This seemed to happen a lot on my site with the 3 term searches.

If you actually look at my keywords, the one on top is 'cell phone forum(s)' Another popular one was 'lg voyager review'. People searching for 'cell phone forums' signed up more often then any other keyword. Being that the name of the site is specific and that's exactly what they wanted, higher turnovers would be expected.

2 word keywords seem to have an influx of signups because these include any file names. (whatever.mid is two words) Users know exactly what file they want and have to sign up to download an attachment. Another factor for me is '_whatever_ forum', or '_whatever_ ringtone/wallpaper'.

I noticed a lot of the 8+ keywords were borderline sentences. At that point it seemed that these people didn't properly know how to use a search engine, and the pages they found just happened to contain a lot of the same keywords (minus filler words, such as 'the', 'and', 'with', which are counted)

I wish there was a way to measure outbound clicks on ads. (in my case adsense, vibrant, chitika)