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How to report on Google news visits in Sitecatalyst? I have heard this question time and time again and it amazes me that this is still unnecessaryily hard thing to achieve in Omniture. 

The problem with Google news referrals is that they come from news.google.* depending on location. So the most obvious place to look for this is in finding methods. Referring domains only does top level domains so you have stats for say google.com and google.co.uk, some of these numbers will include news.google.* but you can’t separate them in that report. Omniture does not class news.google.* as a search engines so no point checking that out. So for the user who does not have data warehouse they need to check out the referrer report.  

The referrer report is a powerful beast it contains the exact URL of every referrer sent to your site. So run this report and do a search for news.google and you should get every URL from news.google and the associated visits. If you have a high traffic site with a large number of referrers then you may start to experience issues running this report. Its typical for this report to be slow and sometimes even time out completely.

The next challenge you have is how do I trend on multiple line items to get an overall trend from Google news rather than by URL. So you can’t really do this in SiteCatalyst you need to look at running a datawarehouse report or using the excel client and doing some work if your favourite MS app. But thats another story.