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August 11, 2008

Internal Site Search Reporting

By Caitlin Cook, Google Analytics Support Tech

xray.jpgGoogle Analytics provides you with a lot of information regarding the way visitors search to get to your site. What could be more important? Well, try asking yourself, "Are my visitors finding what they need once they get to my site?" This can actually be measured in several different ways, but one of the most insightful ways is to use the internal site search reports.

If you are using an internal site search tool (for example Google's Custom Search engine) you can track the searches that your visitors place on your site. By doing this, you can gain valuable insights into what your visitor is thinking, by actually having them tell you!

sitesearch.jpg

Not only can you see the keywords people are searching for (located in the Search Terms report) , but you can also gain more context by looking at the page from which they are searching.

  • The start pages can be found in the Site Search Start Pages section. This report shows you where your visitors are starting their searches and it will let you know where your visitors are potentially getting lost. You may need to provide more direction to these areas of the site to help your visitors find what they need.
  • The Destination Pages report allows you to see where your visitors end up after they search, which could help you understand their intentions.
  • The Search Navigation* report will show you where visitors started the search and where they ended up after the search based on the specific search term. Just go to the Search Terms report, click on a search term, and use the drop-down to select Search Navigation. Are your visitors making it to relevant pages based on their searches? You might be surprised at the diversity of the destination page results for a specific search term.
So how do you know which search terms required your visitors to search again? If you look at the Search Term Refinement report, you can see how many people are refining their search after their first attempt. This could help you include refinements in search results pages so your relevant results show on a visitor's first attempt. Maybe it could even help you link or connect products or areas of the site that you previously thought were unrelated. Just click on the specific keyword and change the Analyze drop-down to Search Term Refinement.
searchrefinement.jpg The Categories report is only useful if you use categories for products or sections on your site. It shows which categories your visitors searched on your chosen search term. In the Usage section you can compare visits without site search and visits with site search. This is useful for seeing information like what percentage of conversions for a specific goal occurred from visitors who searched on your site against those who didn't search, as well as numerous other comparisons.

Lastly, there is the Trending report, where you can find information regarding when people searched on your site. How many visits included searches, broken down by the hour, day, week, and month? Just use the Trending drop-down to Visits with Search, and change the time comparison by clicking on the links above the time line. You can also change the Trending drop-down to a number of other options, including the Time after Search, which is the average time they spent on your site after they used your search feature.

In addition to these Site Search reports, if you use Jeremy's greasemonkey Report Enhancer you will have to ability to segment by Search Term in most other reports which is helpful when looking at specific sources or specific pages.

Obviously these are important insights that you shouldn't miss out on if you are using a search feature on your site! Setting up internal site search is very simple and can be done in just a few steps.

1. Edit your main profile information settings and select the 'Do Track Site Search' option.
2. Enter in the query parameter that appears in your URL when you search on your site. Make sure to enter in just the part before the '='. For example, in the URL: http://www.mysite.com?q=freestuff, the q is the site search query parameter.
3. If you use categories just select yes, and enter your category query parameters.
4. Click 'Save Changes'.

Once you have enabled it, the site search report data is located within the Content section of the reports.

Have you found useful and meaningful ways to present your site search data? I'd love to hear your suggestions or ideas!

*As of now the Navigation Summary Reports are currently not functioning correctly, but Google is aware of the issue and we hope to have the report working correctly again soon!


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Posted by Caitlin Cook at 2:44 PM









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Comments

Problem with internal site search, is I was recently working on a site with a very long tail, what I would love is a way to break it down by keyword - I know other (one) packages allow you to do this!

It is all because the search is phrased "ask your question" and it is aimed at children.

Posted by: gerry at August 13, 2008 5:29 AM

@ Gerry: That's true. In Google Analytics you cannot break down your search phrases, and my only suggestion would be to do error checking on the page for phrases like "What is", "How does", etc. Then you can pass the stripped out keyword into a query parameter and set that as your search query parameter. It may also be possible to re-write your search terms report using custom filters and regular expressions which could help you remove the unnecessary parts of the question. Hope that helps some. Thanks for reading!

Posted by: Caitlin Minteer, Google Analytics Support Tech Author Profile Page at August 13, 2008 11:19 AM

Hi there,

Have inherited a site that does not pass the search term as a query string. It is appended to the url. So if anyone searches for "books", the search results page would look something like www.domain.com/g-cat....KeywordZbooks.

For reasons that are debatable, all the "=" signs are replaced by "Z" in the url .

How do i set up site search in this case? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Posted by: Raina at September 30, 2008 6:45 AM

@ Raina: One solution would be to use the custom page tracker events. Normally the search term is stored in a variable on the page, so you can modify your tracking code on this page so that _trackPageview is called with a value equal to the URL of the page plus a query parameter equal to the search term. So for example it might look something like this:

pageTracker._trackPageview(document.location + “&q=” + kwd);

(kwd would be your search term)

There are always other possibilities like rewriting the URI to display the '=' or parsing through to get the term, but I recommend the first option as it seems more straight forward. Hope this helps!

Posted by: Caitlin Minteer, Google Analytics Support Tech Author Profile Page at October 2, 2008 4:28 PM

Thanks Caitlin. Will do as suggested.

However, on reading up further on implementation of Site Search I foresee another probable issue. This site has many subdomains; each specific to a geo.

We want to track all metrics including internal search terms by each subdomain/geo and have created separate profiles to aid this.

Will there be any problem with Site Search reports if filtered for each subdomain?

Thanks in advance

Posted by: Raina at October 3, 2008 4:17 AM

@ Raina: Its hard to say without knowing the exact situation, but if the search results pages are on each subdomain you shouldn't have a problem seeing your internal searches within that profile. If your search results are on a different common domain and you are only including traffic to a subdomain you may have to do some additional work to get that information to Google Analytics.

Posted by: Caitlin Minteer, Google Analytics Support Tech Author Profile Page at October 3, 2008 10:50 AM

The search results pages are on the same subdomain. So i think it should be fine.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Posted by: Raina at October 7, 2008 5:10 AM

@ Raina: No Problem! Thanks for reading!

Posted by: Caitlin Minteer, Google Analytics Support Tech Author Profile Page at October 8, 2008 10:05 AM

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