After our site redesign (we implemented a CMS) I built the basic OSS custom reports to show the search terms found and not found. Post go live of the CMS and after some sanity checking of the reports i noticed that a couple of key phrases (DMP, IVA) were showing up on the not found terms report. Imposable! i thought our site contains those key words in at least 101 different places (pretty much the core of our business is based around the terms DMP and IVA).

After a quick chat with the Webmaster about the results, it turns out the OSS settings required the search term to be > 3 characters to return any results (not very useful in our case). Changed the OSS settings to be > 2 and bingo clients can now see valid results for those terms.

We would never have known this issue existed without those two little reports

Ta
Simon.

A story: using on-site search analysis, we found a major blunder by the merchandising people — they thought everybody used the industry term “swimwear” and that’s the only word they used. They were one of the few sites that sold a wide selection of swimwear year ’round so it was important to the winter vacation population. The on-site search showed additional terms that actually got no search results — “swim suits” and a couple other regional terms. They corrected the on-site thesaurus and also widened the vocabulary in the visible text and product names. In addition to getting the on-site searchers to the right part of the site, the copy changes influenced their external search rankings for those extra terms. So, business for these products went up two ways. And the people looking for swimwear also found tropical clothes in the middle of winter, so average sale size increased.

We love internal search.

Cheers for your blog, been a great start into getting useful results out of Webtrends, as a previous Google Analytics user the change has been a bit painful:)

So have you found anything interesting or helpful in the report?

I’m getting confused as to which measure is best to put against [site search term] would you suggest that visits is correct?

Visits being the number of times a search terms is used whereas pageviews against a search term is more related to number of pages viewed after a search visit.