Cool custom report: What on-site search term led to this page?

Web analytics is all about getting inside the head of the site visitor.  And on-site search is a gold mine of visitor mindset information.

If you are recording on-site search terms at all, then you already have (or can easily make) a report that lists all the search terms people used on your site.   It’s a big, long list of search terms.  But you don’t know where people ended up after those searches.  

You could try using path analysis, but here are two custom reports that are a lot more specific and helpful than the big long list:

• A report that displays a list of all the content page views on your site that were reached through on-site search, and shows the visitors’ search terms that were used to reach each page.
• A report that lists all the on-site search terms used on your site, with all the pages visited from each term.

As long as your on-site search engine is doing a good job of helping people find content, we can pretty much guarantee that perusing these reports will give you a few surprises.  You may find some content that’s reached by on-site search more than you’d like, because the navigation isn’t doing its job or is using the wrong wording.  You may find that people are reaching content using search terms that you didn’t think were important.   And if your on-site search engine is doing a bad job, you’ll see search terms associated with pages that you don’t think are the best match for the terms.

Here are the steps to get these reports:

[As background for the how-to, if you're not familiar with log files, you should know that each request for a page is recorded along with the identify of the referring (previous) page.  If the referring page is the on-site search results page, all that needs to be done is extract the search term from the referring page URL and display it alongside the content page.  This is the basis for the report we describe here.]

Create a custom report dimension that consists of on-site search terms that were in the previous (referring) page:

1. Determine the syntax of your on-site search results page.  It can be as easy as doing a search and looking at the results page address window.  It’s usually something like “/results.asp?keyword=xxxxxxx.”  (If you use WebTrends parameters, it’s “/results.asp?……&WT.oss=xxxxxxx” but WT.oss is not going to be visible in the address window.)
2. Create your dimension.  Base it on “referring page (per hit).”  While still in the “Based On” screen, click on Advanced and the screen will refresh with additional settings.  Choose “Regular Expression” and enter the following (without the quotes and substituting your parameter name for “keyword”):  “keyword=([^&]+)” .  This is a regular expression that extracts everything between the string “keyword=” and the next “&”.
3. Save the dimension

Create the custom report

1.  To get the first report we described, use URL (or even page title) as the primary dimension and the new “on-site-search term in previous page” dimension as the secondary dimension.   For the on-site-search-term dimension, be sure to check the box that says “Exclude activity without dimension data” — this will keep non-search activity out of the report.
2. For the second report we described, switch the order of dimensions.

Attach the report to a profile, make sure it’ll appear in the template, and analyze.

 Related post:  What on-site search terms led to an exit? 

Tags

Somewhat Related Posts