As you may have heard, bing.com is the new search engine from Microsoft. This update allows you to track Bing as a search engine in Google Analytics with visitor keyword detail.

Background

Search still has a long way to go in helping people efficiently find information other than for product search, so reading the Bing press release certainly caught my attention. Although tracking bing.com visitors in Google Analytics will take place automatically, the caveat is, that at present, it is reported as a standard referrer – as if a link from another website. That means it is not grouped with other search engines in your reports and no keyword information is available.

Google will no doubt apply a fix in the near future. However, this post is an update to my tracking regional search engines hack .

The local search engine hack is a script that allows you to define your own list of specific search engines for Google Analytics. For example, by default, Google Analytics groups all Google organic searches a ‘google / organic’. But what if you wish to split this up for google.com versus google.co.uk versus google.cn and all the other country specific domains? This hack enables this and allows you to define other regional specific engines such as naver.com (Korea), Eniro.com (Sweden) etc. Over 100 regional specific search engines are now included, including bing.com, and you can easily add your own (or ask me to add them here!).

The Bing hack for Google Analytics

Using the script is straight forward – simply call it in your GATC before the function call _trackPageview(). For example, a modified GATC is as follows:

<script type="text/javascript">    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); </script>  <script type="text/javascript"> 	var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-123456-1"); </script>  <script src="http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/scripts/custom_se-ga.js" type="text/javascript"></script>  <script type="text/javascript"> 	pageTracker._trackPageview(); </script> 

Don’t forget to change to your account number (UA-123456-1). If you are using the legacy urchin.js GATC, refer to the corresponding script in the Hacks section of this site (Hack #2).

Your Traffic Sources > Search Engines report will then look something like this:

As always I would appreciate your comments/feedback or just a simple rating by clicking on the stars.

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Post tags: bing, search engine, search engine optimisation, search engines, seo