Site Search Analytics | Digital Clicks Blog
So you have a website equipped with a search engine and you are wondering how best to use it, or at least you should be. Good, good then read on. A large proportion of the time, websites fail to fully utilise the gem that is their search engine. What site search analytics does is help collect the usage data from your search engine, allowing you to better understand what is going on. Why is this beneficial? Because understanding your users' search terms gives you a lot of information about how customers are using your website. What they are looking for, how they want to get there, and all in your customers' own words. Properly taking notice of this data means you can better find potential problems or identify new content they might be interested in. It will also give you clues into their user experience—do they find it difficult to navigate or find certain pages, which may indicate perhaps you might benefit from a redesign of part of your user interface? So you want to give it a go but are wondering how you do it? You are in luck. It is relatively simple. Follow these steps: Step 1: First of all, perform a search on your website using the search engine and examine the URL. The URL should look something like this after searching the term digital clicks:http://www.mywebsite.com/search?q=digitalclicksYou need to take note of the term appearing before your search; this is your query parameter; for this example, it is “q.” Step 2: Log onto Google Analytics, and in your website profile, click Edit. Step 3: Click Edit on Main Website Profile Information. Step 4: Now under the Site Search heading, select “Do Track Site Search” and enter your query parameter identified in step 1.”. If you want to stop your search from appearing in your content report, you can do so by clicking the “Yes, strip query parameters out of URL" option. And that’s that you have set up site search analytics on your website; if you look closely and take account of what your customers are searching for, you can benefit from it. I hope you find it useful.