Some Web Analytics tools have offers the possibility of tracking and manipulating information based on the query parameters of the query string.

One of the most used functionalities is Internal Search: This is a very useful and extraordinary feature that allows you to track and measure what people is searching at your website. However if your website has this functionality means that you will have from each particular page, as much pages as searches your users run.

I receive a lot of questions related this feature, saying “in which times you track the information from the query parameter and in which circumstances you strip the query parameter from the url“. In every case you must consider what is a unique url/webpage for you. Why? Because if you leave the query parameter in the url you will have listed as urls as values may the query parameter take. If every time the query parameter changes, we can say we have a completely different page then we should not strip the query parameter from the url. However if changing the value that the query parameter takes doesn’t result into a new page (the query parameter “userid“) then it is a must do to strip it out, because in that case you will have listed the same url as times as Users do login into your website. So if you want to have the total traffic of the same page, you should calculate it (something very uncomfortable).