Comments on: Measuring Internal Site Search with Google Analytics

By: 11 Ways to Optimize your Internal Site Search

11 Ways to Optimize your Internal Site Search — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:26:23 +0000

[...] Know What Visitors are Searching For: Optimizing internal site search begins with understanding what visitors are search for, how often, and why. Do users resort to site search because of poor site navigation? Are certain queries performed over and over? Your website analytics must answer these questions (Google analytics recently launched a site search feature). In addition, track what percentage of search queries return no results. As you improve this feature, you’ll have a metrics to benchmark your progress. [...]

By: Go Forage » Blog Archive » Implementing Analytics: Don’t Forget the Small Stuff

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 21:50:41 +0000

[...] Internal search: Want to know what users are looking for on your website? Without being able to identify the internal search queries, this task becomes increasingly difficult. EpikOne has a useful post on how to track internal search queries using Google Analytics. [...]

By: Ask Enquiro » Blog Archive » What is Often Overlooked in a Web Analytics Implementation? - Online Marketing Articles Focusing on the B2B Space

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 16:49:53 +0000

By: Justin

Justin — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:56:07 +0000

Doh! I need to update a lot of these older posts now that the new interface is live. You can find the query string parameters in the Content > Content Drilldown reprot.

Thanks for reading!

Justin

By: Brandpoint

Brandpoint — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:02:11 +0000

Thanks, but I cant’t find the Dynamic Content report in the new GA interface..

(You should install this http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/dofollow/ – i guess you want as much activity on your blog as possible…:-))

By: Justin

Justin — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 02:06:15 +0000

Hey Mark,

Integrating GA with your site can be challenging, especially when your changes can affect things like SEO. In general, most of our clients have moved to SEO and spider friendly URLs. This means that we need get creative in how we capture user actions.

On thing that I’ve used successfully is urchinTracker. Using this function we can capture user data in GA.

Check out the series I’m writing. It covers tracking visitor clicks with GA.

Justin

By: Mark Derrick

Mark Derrick — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:23:43 +0000

Thanks for some great articles Justin.
After spending countless hours converting some of my sites with mod_rewrite to be Search Engine friendly, I’m now seeing that removing all those wonderful ? signs seems to now be stopping me from gathering useful data.
Have you played around much with GA on sites using mod_rewrite to “tidy” the URLs?

Mark.

By: Justin

Justin — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 23:44:27 +0000

Hi Andres,

That example is just meant to show where the keyword would reside. For GA to track on-site search the keyword needs to be passed in the query string. Another valid example would be:

http://www.foobar.com/search?term=my+search

In the above URL the keyword entered into the site search box is ‘my+search’.

Hope that helps,

Justin

By: Andres

Andres — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 23:40:24 +0000

Are you sure this works:

>>Here’s an easy way to see if GA can track your site >>search. Go to your website and do a search. On the >>search results page, does the URL contains a question >>mark? If so, this means that the search term is >>probably listed some place after the question mark >>(called the query string). Here’s an example:

>>http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=search+analytics&btnG=Google+Search

>>In the above URL the search term entered by the user >>is ‘search analytics‘.

when the domain of the searchengine is the same as the site you are measuring?

thanks,

Andres

By: Justin

Justin — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:09:00 +0000

Hi Elliot,

The key to measuring internal site search is to tag the page that shows the search results with the Google Analytics tracking code. If you are using the Google Search API then make sure the results page you display has been tagged. If you are sending the visitor from your site to Google try to capture the search when they submit the search form. To do this use the urchinTracker function to create a virtual page hit that contains the search term. Here’s a help article about how to use urchinTracker:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27246&query=urchinTracker&topic=&type=

Thanks for reading and the feedback!

Justin