How to Setup a Non Branded Traffic Report in Google Analytics

A while back I discussed the benefits of being able to clearly identify and track the non-branded traffic that was coming into your website. Now I’m going to show you how to setup and create an Advanced Filter within Google Analytics so you can easily and conveniently see your non-branded keywords on your Google Analytics dashboard.

We’re going to pretend we’re looking to filter out the branded keywords for a company called Raspberry Dance Shoes.

Firstly, do you have Google Analytics setup on your website? You do? Great! If not, don’t worry, however you might like to talk to us about setting this up for you.

Warning: You won’t be able to follow this guide without Analytics already running on your website.

Navigate to the Google Analytics product page: http://www.google.com/analytics

Enter your Google account login credentials into the username and password boxes. This must be the Google account that is associated with your Google Analytics data.

Select your Google Analytics website profile

Using the left side menu, navigate down to Organic traffic as shown in the picture below:
Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic

The main window within Google Analytics will then become populated with the keywords people have used to find your website and the number of click-throughs you received from each keyword.

I’ve intentionally blurred the keywords out in this example above.

You will likely notice that a significant number of these top keywords contain your business name, a variation of your company name or a common misspelling of your name.

In this example we’d like to exclude all of these instances of business name in order that we can be left with a clean list of unbranded keywords that people have used to find your products and services.

We’re now going to create an “Advanced Filter” that will separate out these branded keywords from the non-branded keywords.

Select “Advanced” from the menu bar as pictured above.

In the first drop-down box select “Exclude”, in the second box “Keyword” should be highlighted and in the third box select “Matching RegExp”.

In the next box I would like you to enter your company name along with any popular misspellings people use. If we have a business called “Raspberry dance shoes”, that sells dance shoes we would be looking to exclude the keyword “raspberry”.

Each phrase is separated by a pipe character | The pipe character is created by holding the Shift key and then simultaneously pressing the Backwards Slash key on your keyboard.

In our example, the filtered keywords might look like: raspberry|raspbery|rasberry —These represent the branded portion of the name, where as customers would likely be searching for “dance shoes” —so we don’t want to exclude these!

An example of a popular high street shop might look like: wh|whsmiths|smiths|whsmths

For ourselves we would exclude just the word “Hallam” and leave Internet in the results, because this could also represent our Internet Marketing Services.

Enter your branded terms separated by the pipe symbol |

This will now filter your list removing all instances of your brand name, giving you a much more accurate view of the phrases your website is both optimised for and successfully bringing in traffic. The key words or phrases with the greater number of visits are likely to be appearing much higher in the Google search results.

You can now add this information to your main dashboard as a report widget, so you can review your non-branded terms each time without having to repeat the steps above!
Click the “Add to Dashboard” button

Select “My Dashboard” from the drop-down list and check both boxes to display “Timeline” and “Table” views.

By default they will display as “Visits” and “Keyword” at the top of your dashboard.

By clicking on the cog icon in the top right corner it is possible to name these reports so we can better understand what the information is showing us.

Click the cog of the appropriate widget you would like to rename

Give your new Dashboard Widget an appropriate name

Once you’ve named your new widget, click Save and repeat the process for the second widget.

I recommend calling the Timeline Graph “Non Branded Keyword Traffic” and the Table of keywords “Non Branded Keywords” so that this makes much more sense next time you come back and look at your analytics reports.

Armed with this tool, you’ll now be able to make quicker decisions based around the existing keywords that are bringing traffic to your website without the numbers and graphs being distorted by people searching for your brand or company name.

Further Reading
What is Non Branded Keyword Traffic?
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How to Setup a Goal in Google Analytics

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