Analytics Expert Blog

Out of nowhere, everyone has been clambering for us to add support for google.com/aclk referrers. Something must have changed on Google’s end recently because these didn’t used to be that common but they are now. Many people have told us that the original search is included in the referrer string and sent us examples. So we finally just added support for this. However, based on our limited testing, when clicking on ads on google.com we don’t see the q variable (that contains the search) in the string. So, we’re guessing it’s only there sometimes. What would cause it to be there or not is beyond us. Anyways, if the q variable is there, the search will now be displayed, and either way, the visitor will always be classified as advertising now.

Also, a few months ago, we wrote a post about Google and Ajax searches. We said when we saw these referrers we were just going to ignore them, because otherwise they showed up as normal links from google.com and that was causing confusion – but you all hated that idea, so we disabled it. We’ve just updated it now so that it will no longer show up in your links report, and the visitor will be classified as a search in traffic sources. And the referrer will be manually changed to google.com/search with no query in your visitors report. We wanted to add some link to click on to explain why the search was blank but decided against that.

And finally, we’re frantically working to fix some outstanding bugs with the new Clicky that we were unable to fix last week because of travel plans, including the small site bug. We’ll keep you updated.