How to Include Blekko as Search Engine in Google Analytics

Yes, I spend most of my search time putting my eyes on Google SERPs results, a pinch more on Bing but as a search engine I love Blekko.

Not only because they offer relevant SEO data like inbound links, states and countries where the links are coming from, duplicate content, when the site was last crawled, etc, also because their results are far more interesting.

Slashing queries (interesting integration of search queries and the popular twitter hashtags) is maybe an advanced feature for most users but as search engine users are becoming more sophisticated in the way we use them. Young but promising one.

I was recently taking a look at the sites Google Analytics include as search engines, thus showing their data at search organic report. Blekko was not of them and, as a consequence, it shows up as referrer what leaves apart some interesting data as keywords when someone visits your site after querying this engine.

No idea why it is not included but it could be the way Blekko constructs its queries, example http://blekko.com/ws/analytics+for+seo where there is no parameter handling the query terms, something like http://blekko.com/?q=analytics+for+seo and this is what Google Analytics needs at least to include a search engine in the list.

The thing is I want it to be there and get all the possible information from it. You might think it is not such a popular search engine and the visits coming from it are going to be very few. You are somehow right, Blekko has not a big piece of the market share but any bite of information counts and, what the heck!, I like it.

Here is how.

Tweaking GA tracking Code to include Blekko

I was never a terrific programmer and lately I'm not coding a lot so I asked mate Eduardo Cereto, the most technical analytics geek I've ever met, to review this piece of JavaScript to add to your regular GA tracking code. It is simple, copy code in red and add to your code the way is shown below.

<!-- Google Analytics Tracking Code -->
<script type="text/javascript">
   var _gaq = _gaq || [];
   _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-0000000-1']);
   if (document.referrer.indexOf('blekko.com/ws/') >= 0) {
     var ref = document.referrer;
     _gaq.push(['_setReferrerOverride', ref.replace(/\/ws\/[^?]/, '/ws/?q=')]);
     _gaq.push(['_addOrganic', 'blekko.com', 'q']);
   }
   _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
   (function() {
     var ga = document.createElement('script');
     ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl....
     ga.setAttribute('async', 'true');
     document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga);
   })();
</script>

It works as you can see at these screenshots from my GA account.

From here you could be adding to the mix the regular metrics you use in your daily data torture routine.