Microsoft has recently launched the new Live.com search engine. Currently, when you search on MSN.com (or msn.co.uk, or any other regional variation) your search results are shown on the live.com domain. However, if a user clicks on an organic link to visit your site, then they will not be tracked as an organic search engine referral because live.com is not yet in the list of search engines that Google Analytics recognises.

You can fix this yourself simply by adding a line to the page tag that tells GA what to look out for when it sees a referral from Live.com. Just add

_uOsr[20]=”search.live.com”; _uOkw[20]=”q”;

to your page tag, so it looks like this:

<script src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
_uacct = “UA-xxxx-x”;
_uOsr[20]=”search.live.com”; _uOkw[20]=”q”;
urchinTracker();
</script>

Once you have the extra search engine listed in your page tag, Google Analytics will recognise Live.com as a search engine and the organic search keyword data will also be tracked (PPC links, as long as they are already tagged, should be okay as they are).

There were some teething problems with Live.com that meant there was no referral data at all being passed from MSN/Live.com for the last few days (and this will show in your reports as a drop in traffic from msn.com) but this has now been fixed.

No doubt Google will add Live.com to the next update of the urchin.js file, but until then ensure you have the most correct referral data by adding Live.com to your list of search engines.