In part one I’ve described rss subscription as an important metric to measure, the second of this three part post shows you how to setup and monitor the all importan site wide search in Google Analytics.
Why monitor your searches?
If you can see what people are expecting on your site, then it follows that you can provide what they are searching for. Site search can give you a gallon loads of fresh ideas for content, and also taps into people’s perceptions of your brand, products and content. It may also give insight into areas which are lacking within your site search algorithm, for example perhaps people are searching more for tags than they are for blog post titles.
Depending on what platform you are on, this may work differently, you may want to dig deep in the documentation to see what exact your search boxes is monitoring. It’s always worth having a play about with some of the terms that other people use to search across your content as it puts you firmly back in the seat of a user – which is a definite positive for site owners.
Search QueryStrings
The first thing you need to do to add Google tracking to your site search is to work out what your search querystrings parameters are. A querystring – for those of you who aren’t involved in web programming, is one way of passing variables from one page to another – via the URL. A question mark is used at the end of the page name denotes the start of a querystring, For example:
http://blog.webdistortion.com/?s=twitter
In this – the question mark tells the program that a querystring exists, with a variable of “s” that is equal to twitter. When Google asks you for your querystring in the next stage of the setup it means the variable “s” that gets set to a value.I’m on the WordPress platform, and this will work for you if on the same. However if your search works differently, you’ll have to work out the querystring defaults for yourself.
Simple really. Now onto setting it up.
Analytics for Search Goals
To get this setup in Google, firstly log into your account, click edit on the site in question, to get to the profile information screen. The link to edit this is available on the right hand side of the page underneath the “receiving data” checkmark. It is easy to miss, but once you’ve clicked this, assuming you are on WordPress, you can add this by copying the information shown below:
As mentioned earlier “s” is the string you need to use here. This is all you have to do to turn on site search data on your blog. It will then appear underneath Content > Site search in your Google report. Still stuck? You can try following the guidelines over at Google’s webmaster guidelines. Hopefully, you’ll be able to gain the insight that you need to grow as a blogger.
