Google Analytics Search Terms – Set up site search

Google Analytics Search Terms

Google analytics is one of the most powerful tools for digital marketers. It is an essential part of marketing which can help you in many ways. It gives you data and insights which could help you to develop marketing strategies accordingly. You could get the reports, user data, define goals, track search terms, understand audience, real time users, age of users, time of sessions, session duration and much more.

Frankly, I spent a lot of time in analytics reports to understand what goes wrong and what is right for my website when it comes to create performance matrix. I develop marketing strategies and campaigns after studying the data and reports available in Google Analytics. Today we are going to talk about Google Analytics Search Terms. It is a practice to set up site search and collect the data of search terms used by website visitors to find a product or service while exploring the website.

Yes you got it right, here we are talking about the search option on website. Most of you have seen the search box on different portals. It is for users who are looking for any particular product or service. Let’s take an example of my blog TheSEOGuy.

On my Blog the search bar is available on right hand side menu of every blog post.

You can simply write anything in search box and get the results. But there are some benefits of tracking all these searches. Let’s quickly move on to the interesting part and understand the site search before learning google analytics site search setup process.

Site Search

Site search is a practice to understand your user behaviour. It is a great way of identifying what your site visitors are looking in a website. It helps to collect the data of searched keywords on a website which helps to identify the scope of improvement. It is one of the important factors for ecommerce platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, Snapdeal, Flipkart, Myntra and Limeroad. These are few most commonly used ecommerce platforms where site search played an important role in understand user need by collecting the user search data on website. Let’s take an example of Alibaba here.

As you can see in above image, the website has a search bar for users who are looking for product or services. I have written “Digital marketing” and it gave me suggestions such as :

• Books of Digital Marketing Services
• Internet Services of Digital Marketing
• Software related to or used in Digital Marketing
• Digital marketing Agency

It’s important for website owners to understand what users are typing in search bar and what kind of product or services they are looking for. By enabling Site Search on web, we can do it easily. We can track the user queries which they have written in search bar. On the basis of collected data, you can easily identify which is the favorite product or service of your website users.

It seems that site search is important only for ecommerce where people deliberately type and search products or services. But it is equally important for every website which has search bar on available. Everyone deserves to know what users are looking for.

Now time to move on to the interesting stuff. Let’s learn how to enable site search in Analytics. This practice is called Google Analytics Search Terms.

Set up Google Analytics Search Term

Setting up site search using Google Analytics is easy. All you need to do is follow the basic instructions below.

• Open Google Analytics
• Go to Admin
• Click on View Settings

• Scroll Down and look for “Site Search Tracking”
• Enable the option and enter the search parameter
• Site search tracking jpg
• Click on Save

Now important thing to keep in mind while setting up site search. As you can see in the image that you could use up to five parameters so always test the parameters before entering them.

Search Parameters

Every website has different query strings and search parameters which you can test manually. Search parameters are the URL parameters which you might have seen on different websites. For example, whenever users search anything on my website, their queries are usually included in the URL.

If you use search box at my blog TheSEOGuy and search Latest SEO Tips, you see S (my blog’s query parameter) followed by your query:

https://theseoguy.in/?s=latest+seo+tips

You can refer the given below screenshot for the same.

Strip Queries

While setting up the site search, you would see an option of “Strip query parameters out of URL”. This option is to strip the query parameters out and show the search only. For example, while checking up the search data in Behaviour > Site Search> it will show up like this /?s=latest+seo+tips but if we have enabled the option of strip query parameters out of URL then it will remove the query parameters and show the keyword only “Latest SEO Tips”. You can Learn more about Strip Queries here.

Where to find Site searches in Analytics

Once you are done with setup, you could check all the searched terms which people have used while searching for your products or services. For this you can follow given below steps.

• Open Google Analytics
• Go to Behavior from left hand side menu
• Click on Site Search
• Select “Search Terms”

Set the date range according to your need and you will get all the search terms data in front of you.

Hope this information on setting up site search would help you to enable site search for your website. You may share your feedback on this information by commenting below. If you have any questions from us then do let us know. You could use our Contact Page to reach out to us.

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