3.3 How we determine clicks from organic visitors

In this article:

  1. What is a click in RankSense?
  2. How is RankSense able to measure clicks?
  3. Set up auto-tagging for accurate clicks in RankSense

RankSense reports the number of organic search clicks on the dashboard and on the Insights tab. You may be wondering how we obtain this number without being connected to an analytics tool.

What is a click in RankSense?

In RankSense, a click is counted whenever a user clicks on a landing page in the search results.

This is different from “sessions” in Google Analytics. Google Analytics counts a session when the Google Analytics JavaScript is fired. It will count a new session when a user’s session expires. Google Analytics also often attributes direct sessions to the organic channel if the user originally landed on your site from organic search. This is called the “last non-direct click attribution model,” and it is enabled by default.

How is RankSense able to measure clicks?

RankSense runs on Cloudflare, so it is able to see the HTTP referrer in the requests that Cloudflare receives. This allows us to determine the number of clicks to each URL in real time.

We exclude clicks on URLs that include the parameter “gclid” to filter out visits coming from Google Ads. If your site has auto-tagging enabled and functioning properly, we will exclude clicks from Google Ads.

The HTTP referrer allows us to see which search engine the clicks are coming from, allowing you to filter for a specific search engine in the Insights tab. These are the search engines that we include:

  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Yandex
  • Bing
  • Ask
  • AOL
  • Baidu
  • Wolfram Alpha
  • Duck Duck Go
  • WebCrawler
  • Archive

Other search engines are combined into “Other” on the Insights tab.

Set up auto-tagging for accurate clicks in RankSense

In order for RankSense to exclude clicks from your Google ads, you must have auto-tagging set up in your Google Ads account. Visit Google’s article on what auto-tagging is and how to set it up for more information. This feature is enabled by default. We also recommend that you ensure auto-tagging is functioning properly.

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