Site Search « Web Analytics Zen

How to Track Site Search in Your WordPress Blog with Google Analytics

Posted by Patrick Patterson in Google Analytics on March 15, 2009

So, now that you are tracking your visitors in Google Analytics on WordPress, let’s move on to tracking site search. Tracking site search can give you very valuable information about what your users are looking for on your site in their own words. If people cannot quickly find what they are looking for your on your website, they will leave and go to a better website. Understanding and ultimately improving your site to bring out those “hard to find places” is a quick and easy win on the road to the perfect website.

Honestly, this is one of the quickest and easiest setups. Here we go (remember, this is for WordPress 2.7.1):

1) On your Analytic Settings home page find the Website Profile of your wordpress blog. Click on the Edit button.

2) In the upper right hand corner of the Main Website Profile Information box, click on Edit.

3) Under “Site Search” click on the radio button “Do Track Site Search”, enter only the letter s in the Query Parameter, and fill in the rest as you see below.

4) Wait a little bit and viola! You have now tracking site search.

Stay tuned for tips and tricks on optimizing your site for what your visitors are searching for.

Note: If you are not using WordPress or using a version that has changed the query string parameters for searching, you can quickly find what you are looking for by performing a search on your site and identifying the query string variable for your search keywords.