Cool custom report: How visitors refine their on-site searches
The report we describe here is a good one for understanding visitors’ interactions with your on-site search. It focuses on people who do an on-site search and then, for some reason, immediately search again with a different search term. In the on-site search biz, the second term is called the “refined” term.
If somebody makes a second search immediately, they may have thought the first results were too broad (too many results), or perhaps they didn’t get appropriate-looking (or any) results the first time.
This two dimension report shows the first term they used, paired with the second (refined) term.
In the analyzed report you’ll find a lot of misspellings (and people’s re-attempts to get it right). More importantly, you’ll get a sense of visitors’ persistence as they try to find the elusive correct vocabulary for what they want … where “correct vocabulary” all too often means what your site’s copy writers used.
Overall, if you pay attention to how they refine their first term, you’ll get a better idea of what they wanted on their first search. This report can help you improve your site’s vocabulary so it more closely matches the vocabulary your visitors use on their first search attempt.
Report Construction
This report requires that your search results page’s URL contains the search term used in the search. In other words, it must be something like “/searchresults.aspx?keyword=wild+haggis” or “/searchresults.aspx?WT.oss=wild+haggis”.
As said above, this report has two nested dimensions. The whole thing depends on a hit filter that allows only search results pages that were immediately preceded by another search results page. The primary dimension is the search term displayed in the URL of the previous hit (the referring page). The secondary dimension is the search term displayed in the URL of the current hit. Got that?
We’ve described the primary dimension previously, in this post on on-site search terms. It’s basically the search term for the immediately preceding search. There’s a cool trick to extracting the on-site search term for the previous hit, detailed in the other post.
The secondary dimension is the on-site search term parameter for the current hit (”WT.oss=” or “keyword=” or something else) .
The report filter is -
- a hit filter
- “must match ALL criteria”
- first criterion: URL is a search results page (searchresults.aspx or whatever)
- Second criterion: Referring Page (per hit) is a search results page (searchresults.aspx or whatever)
That’s it. Ask if you have questions. One desirable thing that you can’t get out of this report is detail when three or more searches are strung together. This report only deals with pairs. If somebody searched three times in a row, their first pair (search #1 and #2) will be in the report and so will their second pair (#2 and #3), but there will be no way to see #1 and #3 together.
4 comments
This is very informative post. I read all your 3 posts on onsite search. We implemented Onsite search terms on our website. But we are getting problem like we are not able to address one mystery. We configure our webtrends report to get Found and not found terms. But we are getting one “null” value as top search term. We investigate a lot but not able to find the solution. Though checked different combinations of search terms and checked the related webtrends tags that are firing along with those searches but still not able to find that null value mystery. Checked some log files from search tool but no clue for that? Do you have any idea for this.
Sheen – My first guess would be that it’s an empty search. Does that fit? Is it possible to enter a blank search? If so, “null” could be how your page or search engine is coded to respond to that, sending SDC a parameter of “WT.oss=null”. On the other hand, if you are seeing the word “None” (rather than “null”) it could be related to visits or pages where WT.oss was not present at all, i.e. a statistic on instances of pages being something other than a search results page.
Since you said “null” instead of “none,” my bet is on an empty search.
Your search tool probably won’t use the same vocabulary as your page coding, so I’m not surprised the search tool doesn’t report on the term “null.”
That’s my best guess. If I’m wrong, this would be a really good topic to put before the general user population over at the WebTrends User Forum, at http://forums.webtrends.com. A great resource.
Hi Rocky,
Thanks for your response. I checked with all the combination which include space or blank and checked it thro’ Firebug for parameter value WT.oss we are getting but i haven’t found that null figure anywhere. And interestingly i am getting product sales/revenue from that term.
The search tool on the other hand showed null value when there is no results for the requested search terms.
I am going to address this in webTrends forum as you suggested.
Keep posting your detalied oriented technical posts of WebTrends.!! I love to read all of your reports. Though i have some queries that i want to confirm and i’ll comment on the related posts if you don’t mind.
Cool. We look forward to more comments and q’s from you. The forum will solve your problem, high probability!
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