I’ve taken some time out to write a script that provides a nice API to access Google cookies. If you’ve seen the Google cookies before, they can look pretty cryptic and will require you to memorise the syntax of how the cookies are formed which you don’t necessarily want to do to save brain space.

I won’t really go into the intricate details of Google cookies so this post will assume you know what you’re looking for. I may write up a post to explain more in-depth how Google cookies work later on. In the mean time, you can watch this presentation by Google on cookies (it’s pretty good!) or read the documentation to find out more about Google cookies.

So how is this useful? Well it really depends. You may use it to read GA campaign values and integrate it with your CRM system to track where your leads/sales are coming from or write custom scripts that integrate with GA (i.e. custom variables). It’s really up to you!

Anyway, on to the script.

Below you will find the source code of the script I’ve written. To copy it, simply double click on the source code area (which will highlight the code) and simply do a ctrl-c to copy.

/**
 *	@author:	Danny Ng (http://www.dannytalk.com/2010/08/19/read-google-an…-cookie-script/)
 *	@modified:	19/08/10
 *	@notes:		Free to use and distribute without altering this comment. Would appreciate a link back :)
 */

// Strip leading and trailing white-space
String.prototype.trim = function() { return this.replace(/^\s*|\s*$/g, ''); }

// Check if string is empty
String.prototype.empty = function() {
	if (this.length == 0)
		return true;
	else if (this.length > 0)
		return /^\s*$/.test(this);
}

// Breaks cookie into an object of keypair cookie values
function crumbleCookie(c)
{
	var cookie_array = document.cookie.split(';');
	var keyvaluepair = {};
	for (var cookie = 0; cookie < cookie_array.length; cookie++)
	{
		var key = cookie_array[cookie].substring(0, cookie_array[cookie].indexOf('=')).trim();
		var value = cookie_array[cookie].substring(cookie_array[cookie].indexOf('=')+1, cookie_array[cookie].length).trim();
		keyvaluepair[key] = value;
	}

	if (c)
		return keyvaluepair[c] ? keyvaluepair[c] : null;

	return keyvaluepair;
}

/**
 *	For GA cookie explanation, see http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/ga_cookies/index.html.
 *
 *	@return				-	<void>
 *
 *	@pre-condition		-	pageTracker initialised properly
 *	@post-condition		-	provides 'get' methods to access specific values in the Google Analytics cookies
 */
function gaCookies()
{
	// Cookie syntax: domain-hash.unique-id.ftime.ltime.stime.session-counter
	var utma = function() {
		var utma_array;

		if (crumbleCookie('__utma'))
			utma_array =  crumbleCookie('__utma').split('.');
		else
			return null;

		var domainhash = utma_array[0];
		var uniqueid = utma_array[1];
		var ftime = utma_array[2];
		var ltime = utma_array[3];
		var stime = utma_array[4];
		var sessions = utma_array[5];

		return {
			'cookie': utma_array,
			'domainhash': domainhash,
			'uniqueid': uniqueid,
			'ftime': ftime,
			'ltime': ltime,
			'stime': stime,
			'sessions': sessions
		};
	};

	// Cookie syntax: domain-hash.gif-requests.10.stime
	var utmb = function() {
		var utmb_array;

		if (crumbleCookie('__utmb'))
			utmb_array = crumbleCookie('__utmb').split('.');
		else
			return null;
		var gifrequest = utmb_array[1];

		return {
			'cookie': utmb_array,
			'gifrequest': gifrequest
		};
	};

	// Cookie syntax: domain-hash.value
	var utmv = function() {
		var utmv_array;

		if (crumbleCookie('__utmv'))
			utmv_array = crumbleCookie('__utmv').split('.');
		else
			return null;

		var value = utmv_array[1];

		return {
			'cookie': utmv_array,
			'value': value
		};
	};

	// Cookie syntax: domain-hash.ftime.?.?.utmcsr=X|utmccn=X|utmcmd=X|utmctr=X
	var utmz = function() {
		var utmz_array, source, medium, name, term, content, gclid;

		if (crumbleCookie('__utmz'))
			utmz_array = crumbleCookie('__utmz').split('.');
		else
			return null;

		var utms = utmz_array[4].split('|');
		for (var i = 0; i < utms.length; i++) {
			var key = utms[i].substring(0, utms[i].indexOf('='));
			var val = decodeURIComponent(utms[i].substring(utms[i].indexOf('=')+1, utms[i].length));
			val = val.replace(/^\(|\)$/g, '');	// strip () brackets
			switch(key)
			{
				case 'utmcsr':
					source = val;
					break;
				case 'utmcmd':
					medium = val;
					break;
				case 'utmccn':
					name = val;
					break;
				case 'utmctr':
					term = val;
					break;
				case 'utmcct':
					content = val;
					break;
				case 'utmgclid':
					gclid = val;
					break;
			}
		}

		return {
			'cookie': utmz_array,
			'source': source,
			'medium': medium,
			'name': name,
			'term': term,
			'content': content,
			'gclid': gclid
		};
	};

	// Establish public methods

	// utma cookies
	this.getDomainHash = function() { return (utma() && utma().domainhash) ? utma().domainhash : null };
	this.getUniqueId = function() { return (utma() && utma().uniqueid) ? utma().uniqueid : null };

	this.getInitialVisitTime = function() { return (utma() && utma().ftime) ? utma().ftime : null };
	this.getPreviousVisitTime = function() { return (utma() && utma().ltime) ? utma().ltime : null };
	this.getCurrentVisitTime = function() { return (utma() && utma().stime) ? utma().stime : null };
	this.getSessionCounter = function() { return (utma() && utma().sessions) ? utma().sessions : null };

	// utmb cookies
	this.getGifRequests = function() { return (utmb() && utmb().gifrequest) ? utmb().gifrequest : null }; 

	// utmv cookies
	this.getUserDefinedValue = function () { return (utmv() && utmv().value) ? decodeURIComponent(utmv().value) : null };

	// utmz cookies
	this.getCampaignSource = function () { return (utmz() && utmz().source) ? utmz().source : null };
	this.getCampaignMedium = function () { return (utmz() && utmz().medium) ? utmz().medium : null };
	this.getCampaignName = function () { return (utmz() && utmz().name) ? utmz().name : null };
	this.getCampaignTerm = function () { return (utmz() && utmz().term) ? utmz().term : null};
	this.getCampaignContent = function () { return (utmz() && utmz().content) ? utmz().content : null };
	this.getGclid = function () { return (utmz() && utmz().gclid) ? utmz().gclid : null };
}

API reference:

• getDomainHash() – returns the domain hash that GA uses to uniquely identify each host name.
• getUniqueId() – returns a unique id set by GA.
• getInitialVisitTime() – returns timestamp (seconds since 1 June, 1970 – otherwise known as ctime) of your first visit.
• getPreviousVisitTime() – returns timestamp of your last visit.
• getCurrentVisitTime() – returns timestamp of your current session.
• getSessionCounter() – returns the number of sessions you’ve had on the site.
• getGifRequests() – returns the number of times a GIF request is sent. This is how GA communicates with the Google servers.
• getCampaignSource() – returns the campaign source.
• getCampaignMedium() – returns the campaign medium.
• getCampaignName() – returns the campaign name.
• getCampaignTerm() – returns the campaign term (or keyword).
• getCampaignContent() – returns the campaign content (which can be set by using &utm_content when doing custom tagging).
• getGclid() – returns the gclid value (if you run Adwords and have auto-tagging enabled).

Usage:

Copy and paste the source code into a javascript file and upload it to your server. Import the script into your code by doing <script type=”text/javascript” src=”PATH YOU UPLOADED TO” />.

After that, all you have to do is make an instance of gaCookies class to start accessing it’s public methods.

Note: Make sure you create the instance after pageTracker or _gaq (async script) has been initialised because you can only access the cookies once the cookies has been set by GA.

<script type="text/javascript">
	var gac = new gaCookies();
	alert(gac.getCampaignSource());
</script>

Known Issues:

Currently one of my helper methods, crumbleCookie() isn’t able to accommodate cookies with the same name since it is using an associative array to store the cookie name & value. For example, if there are 2 utma cookies, you will only get access to the latest one (as the later one overrides the former one).

This can happen with GA when cookies (multiple sets of GA cookies) are set to the root domain, sub-domain or even when you use the methods _setDomainName(‘none’) or _setAllowHash(false), doing stuff like cross-domain tracking.

Google uses an internal hashing method that produces an unique hash to identify the domain the cookie is set to, hence they’re able to distinguish which is which. Unfortunately I can’t be bothered to try and decrypt their cryptic javascript file so that I can use their hashing method internally, and for the time being I can’t think of an elegant solution to overcome this problem. One of the major problems with the javascript cookie object is that there is no way to actually read the domain it has been set to – annoying!

Well, that’s all from me. If this has been helpful to you, do let me know!

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Hey all,

Just updated my site’s wordpress theme to Desk Mess Mirrored.

Bit more of a personal touch to it.

Kinda got tired of the old theme.

Yes yes, I’m meant to be blogging but haven’t got around to it :S

Currently I’m working on a mini javascript project which provides an API to access Google Analytics cookies easily. On top of that, I’m also working on writing a search funnel script that tracks the funnel of keywords that users (new & returning) use through the organic medium.

Hopefully I’ll get to post that up soon :)

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Hi guys,

Just a quick update. Went fishing again last week with the boys at Kirkplace :D

Caught a stingray!

Bait I used? Live worms. Yep, I actually cut up the worms while it was still squirming around and threaded it through my hook. It was weird though. We were about to move our spot on the boat when I just decided to reel my line in, thinking I didn’t catch anything since I didn’t feel any bites.

While reeling it in, it just felt heavy. I thought I caught onto some rocks or something. Suddenly my rod bent downwards like crazy and I was like “Whoa!”. Lucky I brought my net otherwise I would’ve lost it as my line wouldn’t have managed that weight.

First time I’ve ever caught a stingray and I didn’t know what to do with it – no idea how to cook stingray. Would be awesome if I knew how to cook it Malaysian style. So I just cut the line and let it go, for it to live to see another day.

Was a crazy day. My friend Steve reeled in a crab using a fishing rod (what the?). Haha, too bad we didn’t get the net out in time and it let go of the bait.

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Just thought I’d share some photos from my weekend. Went to Mooney Mooney to fish at the Hawkesbury river. Hired a boat with one of my mates, Rich.

Beautiful weather on the Saturday. Bright sunny day with blue skies. Perfect conditions for relaxing. Caught a whole bunch of fishes: silver bream, snapper, flat head, tailor and a mulloway (pictured). Funny that I caught a variety.

Bait? Good ol’ prawns. Can’t go wrong with them!

Ah if life was only like this everyday.

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Wow, it’s been like 7.5 months since I made my last blog post. Terrible.

I’m going to ramp things up again so stay tuned :)

What’s been keeping me busy? Well work and life as usual. But I’m looking to buy a Gibson Les Paul Studio now. Sweet looking guitar.

Which one do you reckon I should get? Alpine White or Fire Burst?

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It is a known problem that search engine crawlers aren’t able to read images, hence they aren’t able to determine what the image is about. However, this can be overcomed by utilising the alt attribute of the img tag to describe the image so that search engines are able to read what the image is about.

On the other hand, I do believe that it may be better to optimise your on-page using actual text than using the image alt attribute on certain situations. How you can do this is by using CSS to replace text that can either be within anchor, header tags or simply text in general with background images . Obviously you don’t want to overdo this (i.e. apply to all images on the page) lest you trigger Google‘s spam alert and also it’s very time consuming!

So is using CSS to optimise your on-page illegal in the eyes of Google? Will you be considered trying to obfuscate the search engines for SEO purposes, hence getting yourself banned from the SERPs? The answer to this is how you do it and the question to ask yourself is, are you trying to be dodgy?

The Way To Get Yourself Banned

In Google Webmasters help under hidden text and links, it is pretty clear what are the criterias to get yourself banned. Although not in the list, I would avoid using text-indent: -9999px to hide your text but rather use display:none instead.

I would say the reason for this is because the text-indent property according to w3c is to be used for text formatting purposes, not visual formatting. However, the display property is used for visual formatting purposes instead which fits the purpose of using it to ‘replace’ text with images as it is a visual aspect.

Algorithmically, Google does not ban websites from the SERPs that use CSS to hide things and obviously would go through some sort of manual review. That’s why it’s important that you ensure you don’t have comments in the source code that reveal your intention of keyword spamming or displaying optimised keywords only for the search engines.

The simply rule to follow is this: if you find yourself questioning whether what you’re doing is spam worthy, then it’s probably spam worthy. What you want to make sure is that you’re using css image replacements with the right intention which is to provide accessibility to users that have CSS disabled and to ensure that search engines are able to read and recognise the important aspects of your page that add value to the user experience.

Using CSS Image Replacement The Right Way

Let’s take a look at Allianz’s homepage, a major insurance provider and how they’ve used CSS replacement the correct way.

You can see on the homepage that navigation menu (highlighted in red box) comprises of image menu items that search engines aren’t able to read. Well, they can actually read it if the image files are optimised with the alt attribute, however I do believe that optimised anchor texts have a greater weighting in SEO than image alt attributes. This use of images is obviously aesthetically more appealing to the user than using normal anchor text.

Looking at the non-CSS version when you disable CSS, you can see below (highlighted in red box) that these navigational menus are actually anchor texts. From a text perspective, this is essentially what search engines see when they’re crawling the site.

You can see how Allianz have used CSS to replace these anchor texts with images, which provide users a rich experience but also optimising for search engines at the same time. There’s nothing spammy about this as the anchor text correlates back to what the images are about and there’s no discrepancies or confusion in terms of understanding what the navigational menu is trying to achieve or convey, with or without CSS.

Now let’s look at an example that currently isn’t using CSS replacement but has the potential to do so. When you look at Fallout’s homepage, you will notice that the navigational menus and links comprise of images and no text at all. Even the image alt attributes aren’t optimised which means search engines aren’t able to tell what the images are about and the internal links aren’t optimised at all!

Looking more specifically at the header sections of the document (highlighted in red box), you can see there’s potential here to use CSS replacement to optimise using header tags (i.e. h1, h2, h3). Essentially what they could’ve done is create a div container as the parent of the header tags, use CSS to display the container’s background image and use display:none on the header tags. The end result is with CSS, it still looks the same but without CSS, the header sections are optimised for search engines.

Looking at the current header sections without CSS, you can see these are still images, unrecognisable by search engines.

However, when you optimise it using CSS image replacement, you can see that the header sections are in text and optimised. This is then readable by search engines and informs them that these sections are important as they are headers.

So go ahead and don’t be afraid to use CSS image replacements if you’re doing it in a positive way that help describes what your page and images are about to search engines and does not seem spammy to users when CSS is disabled. Remember, sites are manually reviewed before deemed keyword spamming so make sure it passes a human test beforehand.

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When launching a website, it is important to identify where your target audience is located and to ensure that you get found within that region. For example, if you were an e-commerce store in Australia where you only shipped goods locally and not internationally, your target customers would be Australians and hence why it is important for you to localise your website to the local search engines.

The reason for this is whenever a user types in Google.com or Yahoo.com into their browser, these search engines will redirect them to the localised search engines based on IP detection. This means that if you’re browsing from Australia and you type in Google.com, you will be redirected to Google.com.au and for Yahoo.com, au.Yahoo.com. Once you’re at these localised search engines, you have the option of choosing local search results only.

This means that if you are found on these localised search results, the organic traffic that you will be getting highly qualified. This is a win-win for both search engines and website owners as search engines are serving more relevant search results, thus better quality and website owners are receiving relevant localised traffic. It’s all about relevancy!

Now you know the importance of localisation (or geo-targeting), here’s some common factors that search engines look for and factors specific to the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo).

Top Level Domain (TLD)

One of the things search engines look out for when it comes to localisation is the top level domain (TLD).

For example, if your website had a TLD of .com.au, search engines would see and evaluate this and determine that the site may be more relevant to the Australian region. By analysing your site’s TLD, search engines are able to determine which region your website may be most relevant to.

You can find out more on the list of country’s relevant TLDs.

Web Server Location

The physical location of your web server’s hosting is important factor in search engine localisation. Each web server has a IP address which can be looked up to see the location of it. You can test this yourself by pinging your website and retrieving the IP address reply and then use a geo IP tool to lookup the location.

There are many reasons why someone may choose to find a web host outside of their local region and one of them is cost.

Take for example my site. Although I’m located in Australia, I’ve decided to go with US hosting because it is simply cheaper. Looking at Google Analytics, it is interesting to note that majority of my search traffic comes from the US and Australia even though I have not localised my site in Google Webmaster Tools.

However, something you should keep in mind is that if your web server is hosted in the same region as your traffic, your page load time will be much faster (i.e. Australian visitor and Australian hosted site). This will definitely improve your site’s user experience.

Content

Yes, this is true. Content is another factor search engines can use to determine whether your site may be more relevant to a certain region or not through contextual analysis. Search engines would then build a geographical profile about your page/site for relevancy purposes. This is probably one of the reasons why I’m ranked well for some keywords/phrases on Google AU and thus, receive a lot of Australian traffic due to the fact that I’ve had blog posts relevant to where I live.

Let’s say if you lived in California and you started writing about how great your local coffee shop is or your favourite restaurant down the road, it would make sense for search engines to determine that your page (or site) is more relevant to people living in California than people living in Sydney!

Sub-Domains and Sub-Directories

A lot of sites nowadays also use sub-domains and/or sub-directories to separate out geographically content aimed at targeting the visitors from the relevant region. Such examples are Yahoo who uses sub-domains to localise their search engines (i.e. au.yahoo.com) and Microsoft who uses sub-directories to localise their content (i.e. microsoft.com/australia).

Search engines are now smart enough to figure out abbreviations such as au, uk, us, and ca to determine the relevancy of these pages to their respective regions. Of course you should always support this by having content relevant to the target region as well.

Take for example au.yahoo.com. You will see that the content on that site has news, articles and headlines relevant to Australia which is different to the yahoo.com site, which has content relevant to US visitors.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google has provided a great tool for webmasters to geo-target sites to a certain region. You can geo-target your main domain, sub-domain and sub-directory by adding them to your dashboard. Once you’ve verified your site entries, you can go to Site configuration, then Settings to set the geographic target.

This is handy only if you have a generic TLD such as .com or .org. If you’ve set your site to target users in the UK, it’s pretty much telling Google to treat your .com or .org site as .co.uk or .org.uk. If your site is already using a country-coded TLD, then this isn’t necessarily as Google automatically associates your site with the relevant regions.

Bear in mind that this feature only affects Google’s SERPs and not other search engines.

Content Language Meta Tag

Although Bing’s webmaster tools currently doesn’t have a geo-targeting feature like Google webmaster tools, a Bing employee has verified that using the content language meta tag does help Bing determine the site’s target region.

For example, if you want your site localised to Bing Australia, put the following meta tag within your head tag.

<meta http-equiv=’Content-Language’ content=’en-au’ />

The purpose of this content language meta tag is to specify the language used for processing content and to identify the audience. Although I couldn’t find whether this affects Google or Yahoo’s algorithm, I can’t see why this shouldn’t help at all.

Finally, to conclude, Bing has written some best practices to follow when considering localising websites.

Hopefully this post has been helpful for you to think about what needs to be done when it comes to localising your site.

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Is there such a thing? I’ve always wondered whether Google‘s organic search algorithm factors in clickthrough rate (CTR) and SERP ranking (normalised) to provide a quality score for organic listings.

This is similar to how Google Adwords’ quality score works. The higher CTR you have and normalising it against the ad position gives you a higher quality score which translates into lower CPC bid. This is how Google rewards advertisers that focus on quality and relevancy instead of just pure bidding.

The understanding is that the better optimised your text ad is (relevancy) for the actual search query and the bid term, the higher CTR you’ll receive which means searchers are taking an action and making a decision (i.e. they’ve found what they’re looking for!).

This in turn rewards Google as well because they’ve provided quality advertisements from advertisers and thus, more people continue using Google and more revenue is made through CPC ads.

So the question is, does this theory of quality score from Adwords apply to organic rankings? If I optimise my site so that it gets equal or higher CTR than what the average is for the SERP position, in Google’s eyes, is my site more relevant to the user thus rewarding my site with a higher ‘quality score’ and a higher quality score means my site would generally rank higher/better for the theme surrounding the search query?

There’s been some research done on what are the CTR distributions on the 1st page of Google’s SERP. Below is a graph compiled by SEO Scientist showing various research data conducted by Eye Tracking and AOL.

Another study done by Searchlight Digital shows CTR distribution of the first page of Google shows somewhat similar results. I haven’t really gone through the references yet of these two sites so please take it with a grain of salt :)

So for example, it seems like 9th position on Google attracts around 2-3% of clicks. What if my website’s average was like 4-5%? Would that mean my site has high relevancy to what users are looking for and thus, should move up the rankings based on relevancy?

Google’s focus (I think anyways) has always been to provide the most relevant search results to users which makes sense to increase rankings for sites that attract a higher CTR than usual.

So how do you optimise your site listing to maximise CTR? I guess there are only 2 on-page elements which you can play around with: the title and meta description. Everyone in the SEO industry knows that the title element is the most important on-page factor for organic rankings but do you know that meta descriptions do not affect organic rankings?

However, it doesn’t mean we should neglect meta descriptions as they do affect CTR. I always treat meta descriptions as your sales pitch or your teaser to entice users to click through to your site. There’s a great blog post by Google Webmaster on how to improve your meta descriptions.

By default, Google looks for the meta description to display in the SERPs but if not found, either scans the page for relevant information or retrieves the description from DMOZ (if listed there).

Would be keen to know what your thoughts are on this topic.

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Thought I’d share a post on how to use advanced filters in Google Analytics and what are some scenarios where they can come in handy.

Advanced filters are very useful for extracting information from available fields (i.e. campaign source, campaign term) using regular expressions and then using the extracted information to manipulate other fields in Google Analytics so that you can customise how data is recorded in your reports.

First of all, before you use advanced filters, it is important that you have some kind of basic knowledge on regular expressions. If you don’t, then perhaps it’s a good idea to read up on what those cryptic symbols mean and how they’re very useful in pattern matching.

Once you’ve gotten a handle on some basic regular expressions, go to your filter manager and create a new filter. In filter type, select custom filter and then the advanced radio button. You will see three drop down menus with a text field next to each one of them. In the drop down menus, you will see a list of fields available in Google Analytics available for you to use.

Each advanced filter allows you to extract information from a maximum of 2 fields, field A and field B while allowing you to write information to a maximum of 1 field, the constructor.

Once you’ve selected a desired field to extract information from, you will need to enter the regular expression in the text field beside it. In your regular expressions, the parenthesis () is used to extract the matching parts of the field value and then storing these matches into variables. The variables $A and $B refer to fields and the numbers refer to the order of the parenthesis (i.e. $A3 corresponds to the 3rd parenthesis of field A’s matched regular expression.). These variables can then be accessed in the constructor to return the extracted value.

So let’s look at an example. Let’s say I wanted to append the category name based on the URL query string parameter to the page title because my CMS can’t seem to generate the category names in the page title and I can’t get any meaningful insights into which categories are popular from the content reports.

In field A, I will choose Request URI and next to it, my regular expression (\?|&)cat=([^&])* which means extract the category value from the URL. This is stored in $A2 because the value I want is in the 2nd parenthesis.

In field B, I’ll just select everything because I want to append $A2 to whatever is already there. This is stored as $B1.

Then in the constructor, I’m telling Google Analytics to append the value in $A2 to the value in $B1. So if the category value extracted is ‘Shoes’ and my original page title is ‘Online Shopping’, then the modified page title will be ‘Online Shopping Shoes’. This should be reflected in the content reports.

I will need the request URI and page title field so I’ll make field A and B as required. By selecting yes for the override output field means that if that field already has a value, override it with the new value. Finally since this isn’t case sensitive, I’ll select no.

That’s pretty much it! I’ve written an example to append true searched terms to the keywords report so you can have a look at that example too.

Remember to always test filters in a test profile before applying it to your main profile.

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1 O LORD, you have searched me

and you know me.

2 You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3 You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

4 Before a word is on my tongue

you know it completely, O LORD.

5 You hem me in—behind and before;

you have laid your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

too lofty for me to attain.

7 Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

if I settle on the far side of the sea,

10 even there your hand will guide me,

your right hand will hold me fast.

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