You probably use your web analytics system to track visitors to your site, where they come from, where they go, and whether they convert one of your offers at the end of their journey. And if you ask your web analytics vendor, whether it is Google, Adobe, or someone else, they will tell you that their system tracks every page equally well on your website. But there is one that it doesn’t track so well–your website search results page.
Now, don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong with your analytics system. It’s just that website search is very specialized, and you need a different approach to capture the right numbers than the way web analytics work. Now, it’s not to say that web analytics systems can’t collect any of the right numbers. If you’ve configured your analytics system properly, it might be able to collect:
- The number of searches conducted
- The search terms being searched for
- Whether the search results were clicked on
There’s just one problem. Time after time, we see that the systems are not configured properly, because it’s quite complicated. Not just on small websites. I see these problems on the largest sites in the world.
Oh wait. There’s another problem. There are a lot more numbers that you need to collect to really understand how well your website. Here are the rest:
- Whether the search returned search results
- Whether the right page was found in the organic or curated matches
- Whether the searcher bounced back to the page
Armed with these numbers, you can measure the effectiveness of your search facility, take actions to improve, and measure how well you’ve done. You can learn the real numbers for your website search if you’re ready to install a specialized system designed to collect website search analytics. [Full disclosure: I serve as senior strategist for SoloSegment.]
