Google analytics always shown what people was searching to reach your site, but since the last 2nd of September it’s also possible to know what are people looking at within your site.
The first feature (referral sources) tells you what was the people looking for when fount your site (just those that finally fount your site) while the second one, the new feature gives you information about what people search in your site when they are already on it.
Why is this awesome? because several things, but mainly because, it could happen that someone fount your site by mistake (was looking for something else not related with your site and your site, for any reason, was in the search result). Once in your site this person gets attracted by the content and does some searches. In this particular case, the keyword is not very important, since apparently the person fount your site as a mistake, but you can get very valuable information about what are people trying to find in your site (or blog) and then, just to give an example, what content you should provide your visitors with.
And if you don’t have a search box in your site or blog, google also offers the new Google Custom Search Engine (both free and paid versions are available).
As soon as I read that this new feature was launched, I went to Google Analytics to find the report, and was very easy since it appear in the content section (off course). The included reports are, Overview, Usage, Start Pages, Destination Pages, Categories (just if you set up this parameter in your profile) and trending. As in other reports is also available the Segment menu to cross segment different group of data.
To set up this feature do the follow:
In order to set up Site Search for your profile, you will need to configure your Profile settings. To do so, please follow the steps below:
1. Click ‘Edit Profile’ under Website Profiles for the profile you would like to enable Site Search for.
2. Select the ‘Do Track Internal Search’ radio button in the Site Search section of ‘Edit Profile.’
3. Enter your ‘Query Parameter’ in the field provided. Please enter only the letters that designate an internal query parameter such as ‘q, st,’.
4. Select whether or not you want Google Analytics to strip out the query parameter from your URL.
If you don’t use ‘Categories’ for your Site Search, then hit ‘Save Changes’ to finish. However, if you do use ‘Categories,’ please continue with the steps below:
5. Select the ‘Yes’ radio button under ‘Do you use categories for site search?’
6. Enter your ‘Query Category’ in the field provided. Please enter only the letters that designate an internal query category such as ‘cat, qc,’.
7. Click ‘Save Changes.’
That’s it, Enjoy it!
