I’m currently reading Web Analytics An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik. It is easy to read and it packed with great insights about analytics - including analystics for social media and SEM.

One thing that struck me the other day was Avinash’s comments about internal search. Even though I often use the internal search box on many of the sites I visit, I hadn’t really thought about its potential as an information source for understanding what people are looking for when they got to my site.

it makes sense that as sites get bigger and bigger, no menu structure, or site map can truly capture the complexity of the information and provide an easy navigation to each and every item. Avinash cites Amazon as an example.

Capturing the data does not need to be complicated, at least not at first. You can start by capturing what the visitor did an internal search for and when he made the search.

If you decide to use Google Analytics, Google recently added a new feature called Site Search. To enable Site Search for your site you need to lo into Google Analytics and find profile settings. Once here you need to edit the Main Website Profile Information and change the Site Search setting to “Do Track Site Search.’ You will also need to enter Query Parameter(s). These enable Google to recognize that a search is taking place. When someone clicks the internal search box on you site, you will probably see something like:

http://billyfire.com/BillyFireSearch.php?search_term=test+entry

or

http://semplanning.com/wordpress/?s=test+search+in+wordpress

In the first case the query parameter is: “search_term”. In the second case, which results from submitting something into the standard Wordpress search box, the query parameter is “s.”

Filed under: Analytics, SEO by Martyn Whittaker