Web analytics is a useful tool to evaluate a website’s SEO effectiveness. When it comes to web analytics packages, many will choose Google Analytics because it covers the basics, is continuously getting improved upon and best of all, it’s free.By default Google Analytics can recognise organic traffic from major search engines worldwide, and you can check their list of support search engines for details.

However, lesser search engines are not supported by default and traffic gets recorded as regular referral instead. As we have seen from China’s search engine market share, it is a good idea to keep a close eye on the lesser search engines, as Google’s second place influence has been in continuous decline ever since their service was re-routed to their Hong Kong site last year, and local operators are no doubt hoping to one day take over.

You can tell Google Analytics to track and recognize organic traffic from additional search engines by tweaking the tracking code you use on your sites. This is done through adding a few lines using the addOrganic method. Below we will show how to add support for SOSO, Sogou and Youdao, the three strongest search engines after Baidu and Google, for both the asynchronous tracking code and the synchronous version.

You should choose to follow the version that you are currently using, and replace “UA-XXXXXX-X” with your profile ID.

Asynchronous Tracking Code

Simply add lines 5-7 to your tracking code as demonstrated below for a standard asynchronous setup. Other manual tweaks can be made if necessary.

[javascript htmlscript=”true” highlight=”5,6,7″]
<script type=”text/javascript”>

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-XXXXXX-X’]);
_gaq.push([‘_addOrganic’, ‘soso’, ‘w’]);
_gaq.push([‘_addOrganic’, ‘sogou’, ‘query’]);
_gaq.push([‘_addOrganic’, ‘youdao’, ‘q’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();

</script>
[/javascript]

Synchronous (Traditional) Tracking Code

Simply add lines 8-10 to your tracking code as demonstrated below for a standard traditional setup. Once again, other manual tweaks can be made if necessary.

[javascript htmlscript=”true” highlight=”8,9,10″]
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src='” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._addOrganic(“soso”,”w”);
pageTracker._addOrganic(“sogou”,”query”);
pageTracker._addOrganic(“youdao”,”q”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
</script>
[/javascript]

Once you have updated the tracking code on your site, Google Analytics will be able to recognize traffic from SOSO, Sogou and Youdao as organic, and include it in search traffic and keyword reports.