The Power of Site Search in Google Analytics

Most websites these days have internal search functionality, which serves visitors with the option to search for specific information within websites. The popularity and effectiveness of Google and other search engines over the past decade have driven a demand for search functionality, which has become an important tool in the webmaster’s toolbox. Web analysts have become aware of the need to analyze how visitors use search, whether it is helpful to them and find out what goals they try to achieve but which you do not yet cater for. Google Analytics provides web analysts with the means to gather this knowledge through Site Search reporting.

Website owners often look at their websites from their own perspective, setting out goals as they see them and to a certain extent determining what visitors are served with. Many website owners aren’t aware of the fact that in order to get the most out of their online businesses they need to put themselves in their visitors’ shoes to find out what their needs are, and customize their websites to meet these needs. Failing to use a user-centric approach is likely to result in loss of business, and many online businesses aren’t even aware of this. Site Search analysis can be a great measure of how well your site performs in serving users with what they need.

The ultimate goal of analyzing site search is finding out how better you can serve your visitors so that they are more likely to stay on your site and hopefully reach your site’s goals. Search functionality that doesn’t deliver good results (in a broad sense) can drive people away from your site, which usually results in losing prospective clients. What’s worse: If you don’t bother about analyzing site search, you may be missing out on an opportunity to boost conversions.

Site Search in Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a bunch of Site Search reports within the Content category, which can tell you more about your site’s search functionality.

Why would you want to analyze how your site search is used?

• Know what your visitors are looking for (and more importantly: not finding)
• Find out more about the needs of your prospective clients, which allows you to correct your site to better suit their needs
• Know whether or not site search is working as it should. Do visitors look for search terms of which info is already available but the search results are no good?

A quick overview of the knowledge you can gather from Site Search reports:

• What percentage of visitors use search functionality
• Which keywords visitors are using (and effectively which information they’re trying to get from you)
• Whether your search functionality provided them with the info they needed or not
• How many and which search refinements were made

Google, listen up! (Feature request)

What would be handy to have are segmentation options with which, for example, you can find out which search terms were used from which start pages. That will enable you to learn which pages are expected to contain certain information. If you see a particular page, which provides info on apples, shows up at the top of search start pages and the top search term used is “apples vs. pears” it’s an indication your page on apples may be missing information that is important to your visitors.

How to enable Site Search in Google Analytics

1. Go to Analytics Settings and click Edit for the website profile you want to enable site search for
2. In the first heading, “Main Website Profile Information”, click Edit in the top right corner
3. Under the sub heading Site Search, select “Do Track Site Search” and enter the query string parameter that is used in your site’s search functionality. For most wordpress blogs, this value would simply be “s”, depending on what the URL of a search results page looks like on your site. If it looks something like yoursite.com/?s=keywordusedinsearch, then “s” is the variable you need to enter here
4. Indicate whether you need certain query string parameters to be filtered out. In some cases, unique ID’s are used in search result URL’s, and to avoid having such URL’s treated as unique pages you’ll want to enable this feature. Simply select “Yes, strip query parameters out of URL” and you’re good to go
5. Indicate whether or not your search uses specific categories. If your site offers searches within products, within archived material, within blog posts, etc., you can set such categories by using this option. This will separate searches within specific categories in the reports.