Regular Expressions .*

By Jason Hawkins on May 10, 2013
  • Google Webmaster Tools

The Miami SEO Company Explains Regular Expressions

The first time I ever dabbled with regular expressions was back when I was studying for my Google Analytics Certification exam. For those of you who don’t know what regular expressions are, they are special characters that match or capture portions of a field, as well as the rules that govern all characters.Most of the data you see in Analytics is gathered by regular expressions, they set rules and execute a command i.e. gather all traffic from the source “Google” and the Medium “Organic”.

If you are not a programmer and you just want to have a little more experience and flexibility with custom reporting with Google Analytics, then learning how to use regular expressions is the solution for you. I once wanted to come up with a way to allow clients to log into Google Analytics and see exactly what they want to see, the results from the work that we the marketing company have put forth, in its entirety and in its rawest form. I began working with custom dashboards which were very helpful and in the dashboards that I created, I included multiple widgets that include things like organic landing page traffic only showing a set of keywords that we the marketing company were targeting for them. Clients were very happy with having the ability to access reports any time to check the progress being made. Here is an example of a dashboard that shows traffic to 3 landing pages and only certain keywords that are being worked on, are included in the reports.

We were targeting 3 cities in Florida for this client so we wanted to show the number of visits to this page via organic searches to those 3 pages and how those keywords performed. Here is what the report looked like.

2013-05-09_2023

These types of reports supplemented with Google Webmaster Tool’s ranking reports really helped the client see first hand what kind of progress was being made with their campaigns. We created those reports using Regex filters that included only keywords that we were targeting. The Regex code was to match x amount of keywords and looked something like this: keyword1|keyword2|keyword3 etc…

As shown in the example below:

2013-05-09_2211

These keyword specific reports are just one of the many ways we go above and beyond when it comes to reporting. We won’t just leave you hanging for 30 days at a time only to provide you with a rank report and a work report showing you a bunch of links that are being built. We provide real reporting that you can access 24 hours a day so that you can be sure we are always making progress. The Miami SEO Company would love to hear from you today! Call or fill out the form on the right to speak with one of our consultants today!



About The Author

Jason Hawkins
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com

Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.