Site search is powerful when analyzing how visitors are navigating your site. Once this tool is set up on your website, you can enable tracking. Within analytics to better understand what information visitors are looking. For or what information they’re having trouble finding.
If you have site search within your site, it’s pretty easy to turn on the reporting within analytics for it. It must be turned on for each individual view level within an analytics account. Here’s a list of steps to activate site search:
In the query parameter field, you will need to define the word or words that determine an internal query parameter.
Select whether or not you use categories, such as drop-down menus to refine a site search.
If you do not, then you’re finished and can hit “save changes.”
If you do use categories:
In the category parameter field, enter the letters that designate an internal query category such as “dog.”
Click “apply.”
Once site search is set up and enabled, you can find reporting for this information under the “behavior” section in the left-hand column.
Under site search settings set site search tracking to on
Within the top tool bar on your site, there’s a clearly labeled “contact us” subpage. But after reviewing your site search information you notice there are a lot of people searching for an email address. You then investigate your site content’s page report and see that there isn’t a lot of sessions on the “contact us” page.
To find out why this is occurring, you could residential phone numbers test out different locations of your subpages menu or have contact information right on the home page or at the bottom of every page.
Are my visitors converting?
One of the most important things to do once you have an analytics account is to set up goals. This is to help you be able to track how many visitors are completing actions on your site; be that landing on the contact page, signing up for a newsletter, purchasing an item, etc.
Goals also help determine if there are any “roadblocks” that are stopping your visitors from converting.
Under the admin tab in the top toolbar, you’ll find the account, property, and view sections. Within the view section, there is “goals.” to be courteous of the length of this post, today we’ll only go over a url destination goal. But keep an eye out for a guide on how to set up different types of goals in future posts.
A url destination goal is triggered when someone lands on that specific url on your page, such as a thank you page, confirmation page, or a pdf. Here’s a list of steps to set up a goal.
It’s not only the pageviews and duration you need to track
Goal details in the destination box, put the landing page that you would like to track.
Example:
You have a big seminar coming up next IS Lists month and a majority of your event registrations come from your website. In regard to the registrations, you’d like to know if more people signup on the home page or on the blog subpages.
To determine this, you could set up two goals. One for the “thank you” page after signing up on the home page of your site and one. Goal for the “thank you” page after signing up on a blog subpage.
Now that you have the basics down from edition 1 and some powerful. Analyzing tips from this edition, you’re on your way to becoming an analytics superhero.
