Google Adds Site Search to Google Analytics

One of the most important but least tracked aspects of your website is how people use search to find things on your site.  Google Analytics has been updated to include a new section for tracking site searches by category.

I'll explain why it's important to track search, describe each of the new reports Google Analytics provides, offer some conclusions you may be able to draw from the reports and then explain how to configure Google Analytics to track searches.

Why track searches?
People typically resort to searching your site when they are either in a hurry or can't find what they are looking for.  It can also be argued that if they are in a hurry and can't find what they are looking for that you still have an issue in that your site doesn't make the important information obvious enough.  Given that the average person spends around 8 seconds on each page of your site you might notice that it seems like everyone is in a hurry!  

What reports will using Google Analytics provide to help me?

• Visits: Who searched and when?
  • When did visitors use site search? - Trends over time to let you know when people are searching.  The drop down box on this report allows you to dig deeper to see how many visitors searched, total unique searches, how many result pages were viewed per search, percentage of people leaving after seeing your search results page (hint: they didn't find what they were looking for), percentage of people refining their search to be more specific (hint: your search results were not very helpful), time spent on your site after they searched and lastly how many results did they user click on to find what they needed.  All of these sub-reports should help you be more critical of your current embedded search.  If people are constantly refining searches or leaving but you know the content they needed was there, maybe it's time to consider Google's site search or another service.
  • How do visitors who searched compare to those who didn't? - This report has the standard 3 tabs you may be familiar with from elsewhere in Google Analytics "Site usage", "Goal Conversion" and "Ecommerce".  The site usage tab allows you to use the drop down boxes to compare visitors that searched against those who did not in terms of how many pages were viewed, how many people after just one page (a "bounce").  If you have configured goals for your site you can switch to the goal conversion tab and, for example, compare visitors who added an item to their cart who used search versus those who did not to see if searches are more or less likely to purchase from you.  If you have e-commerce configured for analytics you can go one step further and the e-commerce tab will tell you if you get more revenue from people who search than those who don't.
• Search: What did visitors search for?
  • Which search terms did visitors use? This report can tell you what the top terms used to search your site were and gives you the same 3 tabs as the previous report.  This means that you can see whether people were more likely to leave your site or buy something based on the terms they used to search.  Clearly if you do track revenue based on visitors to your site and you see that a popular search term results in substantial revenue, it is a strong indicator that this item or product isn't prominent enough in your navigation but has good demand.
  • Which categories did visitors search?  This report tells you how many people are using the more advanced category based searches. You can investigate whether one category of search causes more people to leave the site or purchase something than the other categories of search.
• Content: Where did visitors search?
  • Where did visitors start their searches?  Searchers always have a starting page and this report can tell you which page was the last page they visited before they gave up clicking your navigation and tried to search instead.  This doesn't necessarily mean that the starting page was the dud because they may have bounced around your site with the navigation first.  People want to be successful and feel empowered when they use your site and you can improve this feeling by making visitors feel like they were able to find what they needed by clicking.  It's a small victory but it makes people feel a little happier to use your site so if they resort to searching it can be very disappointing. 
  • Which pages did visitors find?  Once they searched, where did they end up?  This report will tell you where people went for each type of search.

What should you look for?
Take a look at the top 10 search terms on the site and think about the role of your website.  Are any of the search terms valid terms for someone interested in reaching the ultimate goal of your website?  The ultimate goal might be signing up for a newsletter, filling out an application, buying something or submitting a contact form.  If the terms are for this type of content then you may have an information architecture problem.  The solution to this problem is broader than the scope of this post but you should probably gather some of your team together to brainstorm some ideas.  Here are some general pointers but for more information checkout Steve Krug's "Don't make me think".

1. Emphasis is an accent.  If everything on a page is emphasized, nothing on a page is emphasized.  
2. Prioritize.  Your web page reads from top to bottom so the most important messages should appear at the top.  There is only one number one slot on the page.
3. Keep it above the fold.  Not everything deserves to appear in the top part of the page, the trick is deciding which content doesn't belong there.
4. Think like your visitor.  Try to get some people who are unfamiliar with your website to review any different concepts for reorganizing your pages to make sure they can find the new elements you introduce.  An alternative is to try the Google Website Optimizer to test the new designs side by side, otherwise known as an A/B test.  Google serves your new and the old design to a fraction of your existing traffic so you can monitor changes in search behavior and navigation behavior.  Ultimately you can track how many more people converted/ purchased/ signed up because of the new design and make the switch if you have positive results.

To setup search analytics for your site in Google Analytics

1. Go to Analytics Settings for the site where you want to monitor searches
2. Click the edit link on the far right of the "Main Website Profile Information" section
3. You should see a site search section with "don't track site search" selected
4. Change this to "Do track site search" and you should see a new field appear for query parameter and categories
5. The query parameter is the part of your URL which is used to tell your web server which search term was used.  To work this out, go to the search box on your site, enter a search term and hit submit.  Look at the URL on the search results page and you should see something like q=my+search+term or search=my+search+term or something similar.  "q" and "search" are query string parameters and "my+search_term" is the search term.  You may have more than one pair of parameters and search terms, especially if your search has options like cat=my+category where you filter a search based on a category of your website.
6. Enter a list of each query string parameter found in the previous step, separated by commas. So we would use q or search for our example above.
7. If you found that you do have different categories of search like "search people", "search offices", "search products" and there is a query string parameter used to differentiate each search type, select yes where it asks "Do you use categories for site search?" and enter the list of category parameter names.