Rasmus Himmelstrup (@rasmusgi) tweeted a link to a post on Web Analytics Island about how to track the Google Site Preview bot in SiteCatalyst. The tracking relies on the face that Google site preview shows a rendered image of the page so it must execute any javascript on the page. If Google are executing the Site Catalyst code then maybe they are also running the Google Analytics code. I want to track this thing. Let’s get to work!
Kevin at Web Analytics Island uses the user agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) ApplewebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; google web preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13
to identify the Google bot, but this information (as a complete string) is not available in Google Analytics. But I could check that visits using the Google bot version of safari increased after the introduction of Site Preview:
This is kind of what I wanted to see.
I made an advanced segment to contain this data:
Looking at the “Service Providers” report shows that this segment is definitely interesting, even if it is not tracking the Google Site Preview Bot:
Wonder if Google counts the preview as a pageview
already got the answer and it is yes
For what it’s worth, these preview image requests should no longer be counting in Google Analytics ( http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/11/instant-preview-issue-resolved.html ). You may still see them directly in your server logs, or in third-party website metrics tracking tools, but they will no longer be visible in Analytics. Keeping in mind the different ways of creating preview images (either from crawling or on-demand) and the caching of the images, I personally don’t see that much information which could be gained from tracking these requests (but it’s always fun to take a look :-)). For more general information about who sees your search results, don’t forget the impressions & click-through data in Webmaster Tools.
@Aussiewebmasters,
It did count till yesterday (or the day before) I suppose. But it was a bug and supposedly has been fixed.
Francisco
Francisco is correct. This custom segment no longer works.
Why is it, I don’t see previews of sites all the time?
How can I turn this on?
So Google Analytic in not considering the preview as Page preview?
@Yatin.. No.. Its Pageview..!!
Yeap. Same question as Aussie.
Question. Question..
Many questions indeed, but I think it’s not working very well. I dont use this for verifing and preview my site.